THE USE OF MOTIVES IN 

TEACHING MORALS 

AND RELIGION 



raOMAS WALTON GALLOWAY 





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THE USE OF MOTIVES 



THE USE OF MOTIVES 

IN TEACHING MORALS 
AND RELIGION 



THOMAS WALTON GALLOWAY, Ph.D., Litt.D 



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Professor of Zoology, Beloit College 



AUTHOR OP 



" Text-Book of Zoology " 

'Biology of Sex for Parents and Teachers" 

"Reproduction," etc. 




THE PILGRIM PRESS 

BOSTON CHICAGO 






Copyright 1917 
By frank M. SHELDON 



DEC 27 1917 



THE PILGRIM PRESS 
BOSTON 



©CI.A481i72 



^ 



^ 



n 

^ To the 

REVEREND JAMES WALTON McDONALD 

Inspiring pastor of a working church, with a genius for organization; 

A preacher, with a sure instinct for fundamentals; 

A Christian statesman; a loyal friend; and a modest man; 

This study in the methods of the growth of the Spirit 

Is affectionately dedicated. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Chapter I. Educational Methods in Religious Education, 

1. The meaning of pedagogy. 2. Is pedagogy 1 
applicable to religion and the things of the spirit? 
3. The two factors in teaching. 4. The proper rela- 
tion of these two factors in education. 5. Education 
and evangelism. 6. A crying need of better methods. 
7. Summary 

Chapter II, Some Principles Accepted in General 
Education Which Must he Applied in Religious 
Education 17 

1. Introduction. 2. The unity of human per- 
sonality; and its corollaries. 3. Good teaching 
always involves getting from the pupil a complete 
mental reaction to truth, 4. The self-activity of the 
pupil is absolutely essential in moral and religious 
education. 5. The pupiFs interest is the surest road 
to self -activity. 6. The natural instincts, impulses 
and motives should render their service. 7. Per- 
sonal satisfaction is the potent agency in all educa- 
tion. 8. There must be the fullest possible grading of 
all that concerns moral and religious instruction. 
9. We must recognize that all education, and in 
particular moral and religious education, is in a 
tentative and experimental stage. 

Chapter III. Some Essential Natural Elements in 
Education 27 

1. Personality and environment. 2. Adaptation, 
or the adjustment of personahty to the environment. 



viii Contents 

PAOB 

3. The place of personality in life and education. 

4. The beginnings of personality. 5. The enrich- 
ment of the elements of personality. 6. Structure 
of mature personahty. 7. Choice is the critical 
thing in personality. 8. Two chief ways of influenc- 
ing choice. 9. Training choice by impression. 10. 
Training choice through expression. 11. Real moral 
teaching involves both impression and expression. 
12. Results of impression and expression on the 
other internal qualities 



Chapter IV. The Principle of Motivation in Education. 55 

1. The impelling nature of desires in life. 2. These 
natural impulses and desires are legitimate. 3. The 
attitude of the educator toward these desires. 4. 
The meaning of motivation. 5. Relation of ^^motiva- 
tion '^ to some other watchwords of the teacher. 

6. The two-fold test of the value of a natural impulse. 

7. An enumeration of some of the principal impulses, 
instincts and desires that furnish motives in life. 

8. Application of motivation in general education 

Chapter V. Motivation in Sunday-school Teaching. 71 

1. Of what importance to the Sunday schools is this 
search for motives? 2. The impulses and religious 
education. 3. The applicability of motivation to 
moral and religious education. 4. Some practical 
reasons why an appeal to the natural motives of the 
child is necessary in Sunday schools. 5. The use 
of motives is especially necessary because of the 
limited opportunity of the Sunday-school teacher. 
6. The use of motives is pecuharly necessary in 
Sunday school because of the artificiality of much of 
our moral and religious teaching 



Contents 
Chapter VL A Study of the Natural Motives. 



pagb 

81 



1. Introduction: Shortcomings of our present 
inducements. 2. Vague motives; their weakness. 
3. Low motives; their weakness. 4. Appeals too 
lofty or too remote. 5. Summary of the instinctive 
elements to which we may appeal 



Chapter VIL Motivation in the Instructional Side of 
Sunday-school Work 93 

1. The two aspects of education: instruction and 
expression. 2. The pupiPs part in impression: 
attention. 3. Motivation of attention. 4. Peculiar 
value of receptiveness in moral and religious educa- 
tion. 5. The religious effect of partial reception of 
truth. 6. The effect of proper motivation upon 
the degree and quality of reception. 7. Sunday- 
school work has been chiefly instructional; but 
even this has not been well motivated. 8. Natural 
discrepancy between child motives and adult mo- 
tives. 9. Our specific task. 10. Some impulses 
that may furnish motives for learning 



Chapter VIIL Motivating the Expressive Side of Sun- 
day-school Work Ill 

1. Summary. 2, The greater meaning of ex- 
pression in education. 3. Education of choice is 
the heart of moral and religious education. 4. More 
important to motivate expression then impression. 
5. Superior motivation possible in expression. 6. 
Essential to find right motives in educating by ex- 
pression. 7. Some of the natural impulses which 
may serve as motives for expression 



X Contents 

PAGE 

Chapter IX. Certain Principles to Guide the Teacher 
in his Appeal to Motives 125 

1. Review of the natural motives. 2. Selection 
of appropriate motives. 3. Egoistic impulses arise 
early. 4. Later origin of the unselfish motives. 
5. How reconcile these? 6. Legitimate use of the 
self-seeking impulses. 7. What we most need to 
learn. 8. The Sunday-school dilemma. 9. The 
upward-looking impulses. 10. Superiority of natural 
over artificial appeals. 11. Summary 

Chapter X, Forms of Expressive Work Suitable to 
Sunday Schools 137 

1. Review of the principle of expressional work. 

2. Grades of expressional work in the Sunday school. 

3. Forms of hand-work suitable to the Sunday 
school. 4. Summary: The service that hand-work 
renders 

Chapter XL Forms of Expressive Work: Representa- 
tion 149 

1. The essential nature of this form of expression. 

2. The dramatic and play instincts in the child. 

3. The qualities on which these instincts depend 
and the states to which they minister. 4. The use 
of this in Sunday school. 5. Forms of bibUcal 
representation. 6. Summary of the educational 
value of the drama in Sunday-school work. 7. Wor- 
ship as an expressive activity . |, 

Chapter XII . Forms of Expression: Original Personal 
Behavior 163 

1. Introduction. 2. Furnishing motives for con- 
duct, or practise in righteousness. 3. An illustra- 



Contents xi 

tion: giving. 4. The task. 5. The possibiHties. 
6. Some dangers. 7. Some methods. 8. Motiva- 
tion of right conduct through sympathy, a desire to 
serve, and kindred quahties — coupled with desire 
for approval. 9. Use of the quahty of chivalry in 
motivating conduct. 10. Appeal to the spirit of 
tractabiHty or obedience to authority. 11. Motiva- 
tion of life in the home. 12, A suggested program 
of graded social expression. 13. Conclusion 



THE USE OF MOTIVES 

IN TEACHING MORALS AND RELIGION 



CHAPTER I 

EDUCATIONAL METHODS IN RELIGIOUS 
EDUCATION 

1. The meaning of pedagogy. 

Pedagogy merely means the science of teaching. 
The word indicates that teaching human beings may 
be reduced to a science. This impUes that results 
are produced by definite causes in personality and 
character, just as in physics and chemistry and 
medicine. The idea is that in education one must 
know what results are desired and what elements he 
has to work with, before he can go intelligently about 
finding a method of work. 

All this means that the structure of human per- 
sonality is not lawless, but is definite and can be dis- 
covered by study. It means that character grows and 
matures in an orderly and natural, rather than in a 
haphazard, way. It suggests that we may, if we 
learn how personality grows, use the facts we have 
discovered about life in such a way as to help insure 
that it will be sound and right. Pedagogy says that 



2 Use of Motives 

we must not conclude, because the human mind, or 
spirit, is complex and difficult to understand, that it 
is therefore without order and is to be trained accord- 
ing to our impulse and whim. 

All of this seems commonplace enough to a modern 
student of education, and would not need to be 
restated here but for the fact that there is still a good 
deal of antagonism in the minds of some reUgious 
people because more and more emphasis is being 
placed on the pedagogy of morals and religion. They 
feel that in some way this discredits and minimizes 
the spiritual and rehgious elements in life. These 
higher things and the ancient methods of dealing 
with them are thought of as too sacred to be subjected 
to scientific examination and improvement. In a 
journal of some standing in one of our prominent 
denominations this protest was voiced in these 
words: ''What we need is more faith and less 
pedagogy.'' 

Such a point of view as this indicates is clearly 
narrow and unwise. There is no matter so important, 
none so concerns all right-thinking people, as that of 
getting our children firmly grounded in righteousness 
and disposed to accept the way of Christ with respect 
to Ufe. In our efforts to reach this end we cannot 
afford to neglect anything that promises to give Hght 
on this greatest of human enterprises. This book is 
an effort to apply some of the principles of modern 
education to the whole development of personality, 
including morals and reUgion. 



Educational Methods 3 

2. 7s pedagogy applicable to religion and the things 
of the spirit? 

This is only another way of asking whether rehgion 
and the highest quahties in our nature are lawless 
and without fundamental connection with the rest 
of our being, or whether they too are orderly and 
natural and have laws that we can discover and follow, 
so that we may form rules for culturing them. If the 
spiritual part of us and our religious and moral natures 
are closely connected with our physical and mental 
qualities; if these spiritual qualities grow and reach 
their best according to inherent, natural, God-given 
laws; if they can be influenced and definitely changed 
by forces that may be brought to bear on them from 
the outside; and if we may say that certain causes 
tend to produce certain effects in morals and religion 
and in our spiritual characteristics, — it is at once 
clear that we may organize these facts into a common- 
sense system by means of which we may consciously 
influence the lives of our children toward character 
and religious efficiency just as really as toward physical 
or mental efiiciency. 

If it is once agreed that the moral and spiritual 
nature is a part of the natural endowment of mankind, 
indeed just as natural as the qualities of our body and 
mind, it follows that we can get light on the spiritual 
qualities by a study of them, just as we can by a 
careful study of the bodily and mental characteristics. 
Furthermore if we agree that the moral and spiritual 
states are closely related to, and determined in great 



4 Use of Motives 

degree by, the states of body and mind, we must 
recognize that the common-sense study of these lower 
quaUties will also throw light on the pedagogy of the 
spirit. 

Most modern teachers feel all these propositions to 
be true and feel that we have not done as well in our 
efforts at moral and rehgious education as we might 
have done, chiefly because we have been slow to give 
to it that careful and critical study which we have 
given to ordinary education. Such teachers feel that 
Jesus was uttering a very profound truth when he 
said to Nicodemus that the individual spiritual and 
moral nature is ^^ born,^^ — that is, begins in a small 
way, — and therefore must develop just as really as the 
intellectual and physical. They feel that we have 
made this revelation of Jesus, which he gave us to 
enable us to understand and guide the culture of the 
growing soul, do service as a kind of pious excuse for 
a lazy dependence on mystical and supernatural 
processes. We may well beheve that the Father has 
infinite resources for the inspiration of the human 
spirit; but we have no right because of this to ignore 
the perfectly manifest and equally divine natural 
agencies he has placed in our hands to secure the 
soul-culture that he desires. 

3. The two factors in teaching. 

If, then, teaching may become really scientific, and 
if individuals may be educated in respect even to the 
deeper moral and religious nature, it becomes essential 
that we try to see what results we aim to get through 



Educational Methods 5 

our teaching and what resources we have with which 
to get them. In a study of this kind it is important 
that we strip ourselves, for the time, of all traditional 
and theological conceptions and try in a common- 
sense way to find and to state our problems. 

As Christian parents and teachers we are seeking 
with all our powers to develop right and complete, 
which is to say Christlike, character in the individual. 
This means that we take the young child and secure 
in each individual, by information and inspiration and 
training, the development of the disposition and the 
power to choose from within in righteous ways. Jesus 
himself labeled the child as already the type-member 
of the kingdom of heaven, endowed naturally by the 
Creator with all its gradually unfolding powers, 
including the religious and spiritual. 

Choice or decision is the central thing in all character. 
It is the human state in which morality and religion 
are most fully shown. No Christian can be more 
than one who, in all his relations in life, desires the 
right things and is able and willing, because of his 
internal qualities, to choose and to do the right things. 
One who has less than this is not a complete Christian, 
no matter what he believes, how much he knows, nor 
what upturning emotional or intellectual experiences 
he may have had. 

In the effort to train the individual in this quest for 
right character that will choose the right in practise, 
we have just two assets with which to work: (1) 
the inherited personality, with all its original, native, 



6 Use of Motives 

God-given, developing qualities, tendencies, and 
powers; and (2) the facts and truths and relations of 
the universe as these have been revealed to us. It 
is our business so to use these truths as to produce 
just the right results in the personality. To do this 
we must know and respect truth, whatever its source. 
Equally we must know and respect the elements and 
laws of the whole of personality that determine these 
choices. Our task is to get the best results with the 
personalities and the truths at our disposal. 

4. The proper relation of these two factors in edu- 
cation. 

It is our appreciation of these two factors that 
determines how we shall proceed. It is the relative 
value that we give to these two things that determines 
our pedagogy. It is the modern viewpoint that the 
personality of the pupil is the central thing, and that 
truths and systems and science and institutions exist 
for, and are to be adapted to, the child, and not the 
child to these. This view has complete support both 
in the discoveries of the students of childhood and in 
the teachings of Jesus. 

In much of our general teaching we teachers have, 
in effect, been saying something like this: ''The 
subject we are teaching (whether mathematics, 
language, or science) is the result of long study by 
scholars. It is organized in the best way we know. 
The children must come to this subject and take it in 
the way it has been organized and interpreted by our 
mature thinking. If the child is not interested in it 



Educational Methods 7 

in this form, or cannot grasp it, so much the worse 
for the child. This is only evidence that it is not 
normal.'' 

We are not completely away from this sort of thing 
in any of our teaching; but we are rapidly getting 
away from it. We understand, in theory at least, that 
the nature of the child is not to be bent to the logic 
of the subject, but that the subject is to be picked to 
pieces without any respect to our mature science of it, 
and it is to be used in the way which will best arouse, 
stimulate, feed, inform, and nourish the child. The 
child assimilates suitable portions of truth and grows 
by it into truthfulness. 

In our religious education particularly we fall into 
this error of letting our mature ideas of the subject, 
rather than the child, dominate the teaching. We 
say: '' In the Bible we have the truth of God. This 
is the text-book of the religious life. Our theologians 
and denominational philosophers have organized 
some of it into a system. This commends itself to 
our mature minds. This is the doctrine delivered to 
the saints. This must be given to our children so 
that they too may have our views of divine truth.'' 
There is no more justification for this attitude in 
religious matters than in mathematics. Indeed more 
danger will come in the former than in the latter case 
from this unpedagogic attitude. 

The child's religious nature, just as its conception 
of numbers, is a native and growing thing. It is not 
just the same in any two individuals, nor at any two 



8 Use of Motives 

periods in the same individual. As its body and mind, 
so the spirit of the child must have food suited not 
merely to its comprehension but to its interest and 
growth. The sacredness of the spiritual nature does 
not make it any exception to the principle that the 
child is the center of all instruction, and is more sacred 
always than the material of instruction. The only 
value the Bible or any other body of religious teach- 
ing has is that human beings may be taught by it. 
Material for religious teaching must be grad^^d and 
presented solely with the child's needs in view This 
is religious pedagogy. It is common sense applied 
to the proper development of humans, physical, 
mental, social, moral, and spiritual. Our sole test 
must be so to apply truth as to develop by means of 
it the disposition and the power to make right choices 
in life. 

5. Education and evangelism. 

In this task of leading youth into right habits of 
choice two methods have been stressed by religious 
people. Unfortunately these methods have been 
looked upon as antagonistic to one another. One 
attitude is illustrated by the more f ormalistic churches, 
such as the CathoUc, Lutheran and Episcopal. 
These have emphasized chiefly instruction and the 
formation of early habits of right action. All stu- 
dents of religion must be impressed with the hold 
which these churches have been getting upon their 
young people. It may be that much of the matter 
that has been included in this teaching has not been 



Educational Methods 9 

very vital or developing. Nevertheless there can be 
no doubt that the nature of the training is such that 
the influence of the teaching is long-lived. 

On the other hand, and largely as a reaction from 
this formal method of bringing the individual into the 
church, there has arisen a group of religious leaders 
who look on such teaching as of minor importance. 
These people look upon an emotional response, made 
up largely of hopes and fears, as of the first importance. 
This is the idea of the so-called evangelistic churches, 
at least in so far as they are to be distinguished from 
the others. This idea has had a marked develop- 
ment in the last two hundred years. 

Both of these ideas and the methods growing out 
of them are extreme. There is no question that the 
emotions and desires have a large and fundamental 
place in determining choice and character in reference 
to spiritual things, as elsewhere. In this the evangel- 
istic idea and method are sound. On the other hand 
it is equally true that information, training, and habits 
have very much to do with choice and character. 
Training in making right choices prepares for the 
great choice of Christ as Savior of life, and for the 
after choices which test this great choice. In this 
the non-evangelistic churches are equally right. The 
weakness of the formalistic churches is that the 
choices may lack the emotions that give them power. 
The weakness of the evangelistic churches comes from 
the fact that they read into the one great choice more 
meaning than it can possibly contain, and this tends to 



10 Use of Motives 

minimize the importance in their minds of the practi- 
cal choices that follow, and of the character that 
makes them certain. 

Real Christianity can only suffer by any such effort 
to narrow the basis of religion. Religion includes the 
whole of man. Its purpose is to give a sense of pro- 
portion, — a sense of values, — to cause one to make 
choices in the light of the whole of life rather than by 
a portion of it. The evangeUst errs in not realizing 
that morals and religion based on information and 
training are just as vital as any that can grow out of 
the appeal to the more primitive emotions. The 
only thing we are concerned with is right character, 
guided from within into right choices. It is absolutely 
a matter of indifference how much of it comes through 
the emotional side and how much through the in- 
tellectual and habit side, — provided always that the 
right actions of the individual are the outcome of his own 
right states, — and that these are permanent states. 

It is further necessary for us to remember that 
education is not limited to the training of the intelli- 
gence merely. The emotions can be educated and 
need education just as much as the intellect. Much 
of what has been called ^^ heart religion '' and " ex- 
perimental religion '' is an emotional spasm and not 
even a permanent and rightly trained emotional 
attitude. It too often lacks constancy because the 
emotions are not trained and not balanced by cor- 
responding training of the other qualities that help 
to make choices sound. 



Educational Methods 11 

The church, when it comes to understand the peda- 
gogy of the rehgious nature, will not therefore make an 
antithesis between education and evangelism. It 
will rather train the emotional life wisely from the 
beginning alongside with information and reasoning 
and habit, by every teaching device known to us. 
And on the basis of all this it will use the evangelistic 
appeal as warmly and sanely as possible, — not as 
something different from education, but as a part of 
education. It will seek to have every choice, from 
that which accepts Christ as the Master of life to the 
little hourly choices which are so much more difficult 
to make, involve the self-activity of the whole of the 
personality. This is the only way to get a religious 
life that does not involve a continual conflict between 
the desires and the reason. We are greatly at fault 
that we have undertaken to emphasize either at the 
expense of the other. 

6. A crying need of better methods. 

It can scarcely be claimed by any student of the 
subject that our success in rearing our own children 
to the type of character and conduct that can fairly 
be called Christian is so great that we need not look 
for better methods. It is true even in Christian homes 
and churches that a very large proportion of the 
children are not safely developed into what we desire 
in respect to personality. Instead of comfortably 
charging up these failures to supernatural forces of 
evil, it would be more sane and honest to seek out 
the points where we as religious teachers are most 



12 Use of Motives 

signally failing, and try by good pedagogy and sound 
evangelism to increase the measure of our success. 

There is just now a crying need that all the con- 
structive forces of society unite in finding better 
methods of getting right moral and religious results. 
The formal, traditional instruction of the non-evan- 
gelical churches is failing to make real Christians in 
any large numbers. The emotional evangelism of the 
evangelistic churches is in its turn failing to develop 
right character in practise. The homes, the schools, 
the Sunday schools, and the churches should find a 
way to join in this, the most important enterprise of 
human society. The only possible way to correct 
the situation is to take what has been found really 
valuable in the emotional approach and add to this 
the best training and habit-formation we can get; 
vitalize all these methods by the best insight we can 
get from the scientific study of the child and of its 
development. This we must do with minds con- 
tinually open to possible improvement in our methods. 
For we are, as a matter of fact, just beginning to 
experiment on this most complex and difficult phase 
of human education. Our efforts at religious education 
until very recent years have been much like the 
practise of medicine three hundred years ago, — a 
mixture of quackery and superstition. 

Morals and religion, to have any value, must in- 
clude the physical, the intellectual, the emotional, 
and the social in relation to the spiritual. It is there- 
fore more complex and more difficult than any or 



Educational Methods 13 

all of these. But, because it includes these, whatever 
we have learned about education in these simpler 
fields will help us in the higher and more complex task 
of religious education, if we but have the insight to 
use it. We cannot afford to ignore it. 

7. Summary. 

The educational method as applied to rehgion 
merely means that better results will be had if we 
study the factors in the religious life of human beings 
and undertake to meet and utilize all these factors in 
a scientific and complete way. By studying the nature 
and content of the religious qualities, by learning 
how these are related to our other characteristics and 
how they grow, by knowing how truth and situations 
may best be used to develop the qualities we desire, 
we will increase the chances of bringing our young 
people into full use and enjoyment of their moral and 
religious capabilities. Many of the natural qualities, 
as instincts, desires, emotions, ideas, habits and 
the like, have much to do with our choices. Choice 
is at the very heart of morals and religion. All of 
these things may be modified by training. 

Topics for Further Study and Discussion 

1. There are two great factors vv^hich we, as teachers, 
must understand and take into account : 

(l) Personality J which is natural and native; con- 
tains at the outset the germs of all that can de- 
velop later; is central and determines the whole 
process; is plastic and capable of development. 



14 Use of Motives 

(2) The Materials that we may use to stimulate 
personahty. What are they? 

2. Pedagogy consists merely in trying to find out 
so much about both (l) and (2) that we shall get the 
best possible results from applying (2) to (l). 

3. Rehgious Education is not an education of a 
part of personahty. It is the education of all of 
personality into a particular attitude. It must include 
emotions, desires, reason, ideals, habits, choices, 
wiU. 

4. The religious nature is dependent on the nature 
of the body and mind. What are the coroUaries of 
this? 

5. Practical possibilities of combining evangelism 
and education. 

6. The idea of '^ progressive decisions ^^ in respect 
to reHgion. 

Suggestive Questions 

Is there yet a real science of education? When 
can it become so? Do we use the same degree of 
common sense in our training for morals and reHgion 
that w^e use in training for the various life-professions 
and calhngs? Is pedagogy destructive of faith? Do 
we rule God out of hfe when we say that rehgion is a 
natural human quahty? Why must we fail when we 
present religion or anything else to youth in our 
mature form? Why are we so prone to try to bend 
the child to our mature sj^stems? On what internal 
elements does right choice depend? How much 



Educational Methods 15 

emotion is desirable in making choices? How much 
knowledge? Do you think that any child can, once 
for all, make an acceptance of Christ that is adequate 
and complete? What then? What are some of the 
corollaries of a ^^ spiritual birth '7 Why does undue 
magnification of the great decision tend to minimize 
religion in practise? What is right in the matter? 

Some Practical Problems 

1. The practical education of the emotional states. 
Must be properly educated, just as other qualities. 
Emotions must have practise and expression. How 
can we secure practise of the emotions? Education 
sometimes means control and restraint rather than 
increase. Answer in terms of some of the following 
emotions: — sympathy, love, fear, anger, jealousy, 
kindliness, joyousness, gratitude, etc. 

2. The modification of desires. The formation of 
desires. How accomplished? Trace in your own 
experience the growth or waning of some desire. 
What elements entered into this? Bearing of this 
on practical education. Can one desire ever be made 
to aid in the development or control of another? 
Illustrate. 

References 

Bagley: The Educative Process. The Macmillan 

Co., N. Y. $1.25 
Coe: Education in Religion and Morals. Fleming H. 

Revell Co., N. Y. $1.35 



16 Use of Motives 

Galloway: Educational Function of the Sunday 
School, in Encyclopedia of Sunday Schools and 
Religious Education, Thomas Nelson and Sons, 
N. Y. 

Home: Psychological Principles of Education. The 
Macmillan Co., N. Y. §1.75 

James: Talks to Teachers on Psychology. Henry 
Holt & Co., N. Y. S1.50 

Kirkpatrick: Fundamentals of Child Study. The 
Macmillan Co., N. Y. §1.25 



CHAPTER II 

SOME PRINCIPLES ACCEPTED IN GENERAL 

EDUCATION WHICH MUST BE APPLIED 

IN RELIGIOUS EDUCATION 

1. Introduction. 

There will be no effort in this chapter to discuss at 
length the principles of teaching, either in general 
or in religious education. The writer feels, however, 
that mention should be made of a few of the accepted 
beliefs in respect to the general problems of education 
which seem most fully to bear on the moral and 
religious training. There is no thought that we can 
apply directly to religious education all the devices 
that have been found helpful in the common schools. 
Nevertheless any educational principle which has 
been shown to have deep meaning in the education of 
youth is more than likely to throw light on these 
higher forms of education that depend on the lower. 
Some of these fruitful ideas which will help solve our 
problems in religious training are enumerated in 
this chapter. 

2. The unity of human personality; and its corol- 
laries. 

This principle means that personality is not really 
divided up into separate faculties. For convenience 
we sometimes speak as though it were. In fact, 

17 



18 Use of Motives 

however, we cannot separate ourselves into bodily, 
intellectual, emotional, social, moral, and spiritual 
faculties. On the contrary these quahties mutually 
influence one another. No one of them can be trained 
without all of them being modified by it. None can 
be neglected without the suffering of all. When I am 
thinking or feeling or willing my whole personality 
is involved in the act, and not merely a special 
faculty of me. When I am making moral and religious 
choices the same is true. 

Some of the most important corollaries of this truth 
for the teacher of religion and spiritual things are 
these: — (1) We must seek to win and hold the whole 
of the child's nature and make it all contribute to 
and be included in the result; and (2) we have more 
handles or starting-points in our task than we have 
thought. In other words we may start anywhere in 
personality and reach the spiritual if we only have 
insight enough to follow the laws of personality in 
taking our steps. 

3. Good teaching always involves getting from the 
pupil a complete mental reaction to truth. 

When we appeal to, or instruct, or otherwise stimu- 
late a living person we expect a response of some sort. 
This is the sign of life. All life has the power and 
disposition to respond to stimulus. The nature of the 
response is the measure of the life. In our education of 
children in this greatest of all tasks of making righteous 
choices, it is essential that the pupil respond, and re- 
spond correctly in the light of all he knows. Stimulus 



Some Principles of General Education 19 

without response is deadening to the whole of person- 
ahty. To be aroused and not to act tends to destroy 
the power and disposition to respond. Furthermore 
any response which is produced and determined by only 
a part of personality, as by the desires alone or the 
habits alone or the reasoning alone, is necessarily 
incomplete and false to the total of personality. The 
only safe method in early education is to see to it that 
every stimulus is allowed to bring the proper response. 
In this way the child becomes not merely responsive 
but learns to make each response in the light of all 
its outlook and resources. 

4. The self-activity of the pupil is absolutely essential 
in moral and religious education. 

It is not enough in morals to get a response from 
the pupil involving an adequate reaction of his per- 
sonality to the stimulus. This response must be the 
pupiVs very own. It is possible to impart information 
or to get some forms of attitude and habit with little 
internal activity on the part of the child. But in 
morals and religion, as well as in most other significant 
elements of character, the culture does not come 
through responses which are forced from the outside. 
To have moral and spiritual significance all attitudes, 
choices, and decisions must be the child's own. There 
is no place in education where the principle of self- 
activity is as important as in religious training. 

5. The pupiVs interest is the surest road to self- 
activity, 

A complete personal reaction is self-activity. A 



20 Use of Motives 

reaction forced from without does not often insure a 
complete response. Activity or response which is the 
resultant of the whole of the nature is necessarily 
more educative than enforced or partial responses. 
The greatest aid to this kind of response controlled 
from within is the active interest of the child in the 
thing that is desired. Any time spent in finding the 
pupil's interests, or in arousing his interest in some- 
thing which will make him an ally rather than an 
opponent of the parent or teacher, is most profitably 
spent. This principle of interest is one of the most 
fruitful in modern education. It is even more im- 
portant in moral and religious training than in mental, 
since moral choices involve the individuaFs complete 
appreciation of relative values, and his whole-hearted 
response to them. Nothing but interest can secure 
this. 

6. The natural instincts^ impulses and motives should 
render their service. 

All the natural qualities of personality, — as 
curiosity, imagination, restlessness, greed, fear, confi- 
dence, and the like, — are able, if properly handled, to 
make some contribution to personality, including 
the religious nature. The task of the teacher is to 
call upon these inner tendencies and to use them at the 
right time and in the right amount; to develop those 
that should grow, but to see that they do not become 
over-powerful; to displace by better ones those that 
should not become permanent elements in character. 
It is by proper treatment of these native desires and 



Some Principles of General Education 21 

impulses that we arouse interest, get the '' point of 
contact '' in teaching, and secure motives sufficient 
to get self-active responses. We have not really- 
appreciated the driving power of these instincts. 
They furnish the momentum of life. 

7. Personal satisfaction is the potent agency in all 
education. 

All education, including moral and religious, con- 
sists in the establishment of connections or associations 
between situations and conduct by way of our per- 
sonal states. In the lower animals and in lower 
human activities these connections are very simple 
and direct because the internal states are simple. For 
example, a chicken learns to get out of a labyrinth 
and join its fellows on the outside by establishing a 
connection between this total situation and those of 
its own actions by which it gets out. At first it tries 
a large number of useless activities; but gradually 
it learns which of these are useless and it connects 
in its own mind the correct muscular actions with 
the desired result. Thus it learns after some trials 
to get out in one tenth of the time required at first. 
In the higher human stages the connections include 
memory, ideas, habits, standards, choices, and the 
like. But whether in the education of the lower 
animal to perform his tricks or in the human being 
to choose righteousness, the satisfaction or the dis- 
comfort that accompanies the act has more influence 
in stamping in or stamping out the particular response 
or action than anything else. If the child experiences 



22 Use of Motives 

satisfaction as the result of a special action under a 
given situation it is very likely to select and repeat 
the action under similar circumstances. It is by such 
repetition that habitual connections are made. This 
is just as true if the satisfaction takes the higher 
mental and spiritual form. Personal satisfaction is 
thus one of the greatest instruments in the educational 
process, from the lowest to the highest. We must 
come to know how best to use it for moral and religious 
ends. Our work becomes in large measure a matter 
of educating the satisfactions. 

8. There must be the fullest possible grading of all 
that concerns moral and religious instruction. 

This is imphed in much that has already been said. 
It is recognized in some degree even in the crudest of 
our teaching. But we have still further to go in this 
regard. The simplest form of grading, and the first 
to be recognized, is the grading of methods of instruc- 
tion. This we have been doing for some years in the 
old uniform Sunday-school lessons. Different methods 
were devised in an effort to make this one lesson serve 
all ages and grades. It is, to be sure, like grading 
trigonometry to all classes from the kindergarten to 
the high school. It is an effort to compensate for 
presenting unsuitable material at all by seeking to 
do it in a way suited to the development of pupils. 
A more fundamental grading is that of the materials 
of instruction. This means that at every step the 
material chosen must be suited to the particular stage 
of the child's growth and development, to his interests, 



Some Principles of General Education 23 

to his emotional states, to his favorite modes of self- 
expression, and to his satisfactions. In a word our 
matter and method of teaching cannot secure a 
normal, natural, sound, complete personal reaction 
unless it is graded to the whole of personality. It is 
more necessary to grade instruction that seeks to 
secure right conduct than that which seeks merely 
to impart information. So grading is even more 
important in Sunday-school work than it is in the 
day schools; because here information is merely a 
means to an end. We are seeking choice and behavior 
through information. 

9. We must recognize that all education, and in 
particular moral and religious education, is in a tenta- 
tive and experimental stage. 

The quality and results of our efforts at religious 
training have suffered much because of an idea that 
the steps in the religious life have, supernaturally, been 
made complete, simple, and clear. It is not simple. 
On the contrary moral and rehgious education is as 
much more complex than mental as the mental is 
than the physical. Moral and religious education 
includes the mental and the physical and social aside 
from its own particular elements. Much of our failure 
in the past is due to our failure to recognize this fact. 
It has made us careless of our study of the elements in 
moral and religious education. Indeed it has made 
some good people deny that the teacher of religion 
and morals need know anything of psychology or 
pedagogy. It has made us feel that the complex 



24 Use of Motives 

moral and spiritual teaching may safely be put into 
the hands of persons less skilled than those who care 
for the minds of our children or than the physicians 
who care for their bodies. 

In reality the human race is just waking up to the 
complexity and to the possibilities of systematic 
religious education. We have not really penetrated 
the outer crust of the subject. We are not in a position 
to dogmatize about anything. It is our duty to 
recognize that we are experimenting. It is our duty 
to experiment sanely, and through systematic study 
of our experiments to improve. 

Topics for Further Study and Discussion 

1. The relation of the principles of general educa- 
tion to those of moral and religious education. 

2. Mention some of the corollaries of the fact that 
personality is a unity. 

3. " Faculty '' psychology. Meaning of the ex- 
pression. The opposite conception. 

4. The ability to respond to stimuli is the measure 
of Hfe. 

5. Develop more fully the meaning and role of 
self-activity in growth and education. 

6. The strongest reasons for a complete grading of 
Sunday-school lessons. 

Suggestive Questions 

Why is it probable that most of the important dis- 
coveries in general education will help in moral and 



Some Principles of General Education 25 

religious education? Is it possible to train or neglect 
one part of our nature and not have some effect on the 
rest? Does this mean that all parts are of equal 
importance? Why is '' self -activity '' more important 
in moral and religious education than in any other? 
Why is play so educative to children? Which is more 
important, — grading the materials of instruction or 
the method of presenting the material? Why? Is it 
enough to grade Sunday-school instruction to the 
intelligence of the pupil? What then? Why is it 
more important to grade instruction that strives to 
mold choices and conduct than that which seeks 
merely to give information? 

Some Practical Problems 

1. Self-activity versus external control. Is it 
necessary to allow a child to '' run wild '' in order to 
realize " self-activity '^? Must a child be forced 
to feel and think and do as we think best in order to 
have a sound attitude of obedience and to perform 
our full duty by him? What is the sane point of 
view? Have you achieved it? If you are convinced 
that a child should feel or think or do something which 
he is manifestly unwilling to do, what are the wise 
and sane steps of procedure? 

2. Grading teaching to the whole of life. To be 
most successful, teaching must be graded to the 
emotional life, to the desires, to the capacity for 
interest, to the satisfactions, and to the powers of 
expression of the child, as well as to his understanding. 



26 Use of Motives 

Can you mention some aspects of morals and religion 
that a child could not be expected to appreciate? 
Mention some instances of teaching that violate the 
rule. 

3. Complete and partial responses. Suppose a 
child desires very much to do a certain thing. If 
its judgment and experience prompts it to do the 
opposite, how can we best help the child? To get a 
full and complete response we need to win over the 
desires. Why is this better than issuing an order, 
accompanied by a threat? 

References 

Athearn: Contributions of General Psychology and 
Pedagogy to Religious Education, in Encyclo- 
pedia of Sunday Schools and Religious Education. 
Thomas Nelson and Sons, N. Y. 

Burton and Mathews: Principles and Ideals for the 
Sunday School. University of Chicago Press. 
$1.00 

Dewey: Moral Principles in Education. Houghton 
Mifflin Co., Boston. .35 

Galloway: Principles of Religious Development. The 
Macmillan Co., N. Y. $3.00 

Starbuck: Psychology of Religion. Chas. Scribner's 
Sons, N. Y. $1.50. Also Religious Education, 
Vol. 8; Dec, 1913. 

(See also references for Chapter I.) 



CHAPTER III 

SOME ESSENTIAL NATURAL ELEMENTS IN 

EDUCATION 

1. Personality and environment, 

A little thinking will make clear to us that what is 
within us and what is without us make up all the 
elements that enter into our lives. To relate properly 
that which is within us to that which is without is 
the act of Hving, and includes all the problems of 
living. Personality then, in its entirety, and the 
whole of the environment of personahty, include all 
that we can consider in respect to Ufe and education. 
We must not mistake, however. Personality is ex- 
tremely complex, and the environment is equally so, 
including as it does all the material, the mental, the 
social, and the spiritual surroundings. The environ- 
ment includes all that may act upon us. It includes 
truth and beauty and God no less than it does other 
individuals and food and light. Life is the interaction 
of the individual and its environment. 

2. Adaptation, or the adjustment of personality to 
the environment. 

The most interesting and distinctive thing about 
Kfe is the capacity of the individual to be aroused by, 
and the power to respond to, the environment. In 
every act of responding to the influence of the en- 

2^ 



28 Use of Motives 

vironment the individual is changed, and in the long 
run the changes are such that the organism becomes 
better adjusted to its surroundings as the result of 
them. This is found in life of all degrees, and is one 
of the most interesting and far-reaching things we 
have learned from the study of living objects. Every 
act of the Uving organism is in some way related to 
this necessity of adjustment to its environment. All 
education, from the most material to the m^ost spiritual, 
is conditioned by this principle. All organisms must 
in the end become adjusted to all the really im- 
portant and influential forces in their environment. 
Adaptation to truth and God are as real and neces- 
sary, if these are important in influencing hfe, as 
adaptation to water and food, and for the very 
same reasons. 

It is important for us to realize that this adjust- 
ment between the individual and the environment is 
almost exclusively the work of the organism. True, 
the environment may change from time to time and 
might incidentally become more favorable; but the 
individual is really the plastic thing. In the long 
run it must make the adjustment. It is the organism 
and not the environment that is destroyed if the 
adjustment is not made. The shorn lamb becomes 
adjusted to the wind, rather than the reverse. 

Light then is not adjusted to the eye, nor water 
to meet our thirst, nor God to our consciousness of 
him. The eye has gradually grown into adjustment 
to Ught. The organism is the plastic, growing, adap- 



Some Essential Natural Elements 29 

tive thing. Thus have human personalities come into 
adaptation with the great reaUties of the universe 
about us. It is because of this power of adjustment 
that any education is possible. Education should be 
an adjustment to the conditions of life. 

3. The place of personality in life and education. 
In all the process of human growth and education 
it is the human personality that is being continually 
influenced and is becoming adjusted to the real things 
in the environment. It must be recognized as cen- 
tral in the whole process. The environment, good or 
bad, may act and stimulate; but it is the personality 
that responds well or ill, and is modified in accordance 
with the nature of the response. The individual 
cannot again be the same after having been stimu- 
lated and having responded. If it responds in the 
right way it is preserved and has comfort and will be 
more likely to respond in the same way again. Some- 
thing has been left in personality by experience. Per- 
sonality is thus built up by its responses to its stimuli. 
This is development. 

In responding to outside influences men and other 
organisms have a choice of at least two ways of 
acting. For example, organisms that are influenced 
by light or gravity may move toward the light or 
away from it, with the pull of gravity or in the 
opposite direction. Some types of animals and plants 
tend to do one of these things; some tend to do the 
other. Both are adapted to light, but they have 
become adapted in different ways. Their lives be- 



30 Use of Motives 

come very different in consequence. This is the 
beginning of choice in its simplest form. In human 
individuals there are many more kinds of choice than 
for the lower animals. They become very rich and 
varied, and consequently it comes to be more of a 
problem always to make right choices. In man, 
therefore, the higher choices, those that have to do 
with the higher mental, social, moral, and spiritual 
problems and adjustments, become increasingly im- 
portant and increasingly difficult. And yet choices 
are still to be reduced to the right and the wrong, to 
the best and the worst. 

We saw in the preceding chapter that the great 
purpose of religious education is to enable the indi- 
vidual to have the disposition and the abiUty to make 
right choices under the various stimuU of his sur- 
roundings. This is only another way of saying that 
we want individuals to become rightly adapted to the 
whole of their environment, or at least to those 
great elements in it that are most fundamental to 
the abundant life. This is the object of life and of 
education for life. 

4. The beginnings of personality. 

In the beginnings of individual Ufe human per- 
sonality consists chiefly of the following things, all 
of which have been inherited: (1) the senses through 
which the environment acts on the individual; (2) 
certain simple but all-important tendencies, instincts, 
and appetites; (3) certain capacities which are 
wholly latent at first but come into action with 



Some Essential Natural Elements 31 

development; (4) simple powers of muscular action, 
by which responses are made; and (5) a sense of 
satisfaction or dissatisfaction growing out of action. 
We have seen that the external influences may put 
this machinery of personality into motion; as, for 
example, when we put our finger into the mouth of the 
recently born child its instinct of sucking, aroused by 
its sense of touch, produces the muscular response of 
sucking, which is much too complex to be " learned '' 
so readily. It would require a very long time to learn 
to coordinate all the muscles necessary to do this. 
The sense of touch merely sets off this complex, well- 
formed and inherited instinct. But this does not tell 
the whole story of the sucking response. If the child 
is left alone for a while certain changes take place 
within it which makes the child hungry, as we say. 
Then it seeks to get something into its mouth. Its 
own finger may be put there, in answer this time to 
the internal stimulus of hunger , or it may even go 
through the motions of sucking with nothing in the 
mouth. In one case something in the child's environ- 
ment aroused the sucking instinct, and in the other 
an internal appetite aroused it. In our own case the 
smell or sight of food may arouse in us the will to eat, 
or hunger within may stimulate to exactly similar 
actions. 



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Some Essential Natural Elements 33 

DISCUSSION OF FIGURE 1 

This is a diagram of personality at birth. There are inherited 
four main assets: (1) the senses, by which we appreciate the 
stimuH of the outside world or of the internal appetites; (2) 
the muscular apparatus by which we can act; and (3) internal 
nervous connections between these, which determine that a re- 
sponse, and what response, shall follow a stimulus. These nervous 
connections (3), including the brain, are already endowed at 
birth with (4) certain tendencies, or prejudices as we might 
call them, which predispose toward certain actions. These 
predispositions we call instincts^ impulses. The response either 
satisfies the tendency or it does not. If so, action stops for the 
time; if not, action probably continues. These are purely in- 
herited, and are very important in building up the conscious 
personahty. Choice at this stage is instinctive. The illustration 
of the sucking child (p. 31) will suggest the nature of personal 
response at this stage. The arrows show the course of events 
from a stimulus to a response. 

Even in early life, then, we may say that there are 
two important stimulating elements producing action : 
environment, and the inherited instincts and 
tendencies. We are creatures of our instincts and 
surroundings. When these two stimuU act together 
we get the greatest possible influence on behavior and 
on personality. When external stimuli and internal 
impulses lead in the same direction choice is practically 
determined, and choice and response follow very 
directly and naturally upon stimulation. In other 
words, to put something in the mouth of the hungry 
infant insures the instinctive response of sucking. 
This fact has tremendous significance in all education. 



34 Use of Motives 

The accompanying diagram (Fig. 1) suggests the 
make-up of personality in this early stage. 

5. The enrichment of the elements of personality. 

We have seen that the organism is never the same 
after responding to a stimulus. Every time a stimulus 
works on through personaUty to a response, there are 
two effects: (1) the response or reaction itself, good 
or bad; and (2) the internal modification of personality 
due to the stimulus and the reaction. These inner 
changes are most intimate and far-reaching, and 
make human education possible. Of course the senses 
themselves are educated through practise. Similarly 
greater skill in responding will come to the organs 
of expression in the act of responding. Both of these 
enter into education. But very much more important 
still, the internal instincts and tendencies involved 
in the action will be modified by any such reaction. 
They may be strengthened and fixed, or weakened, 
depending on the nature of the experience and the 
outcome of the response in furnishing comfort or 
satisfaction. 

For example, let us return to the sucking babe. 
If when it is hungry a bottle containing milk is given 
it and it gets food as the result of sucking, the child 
has had an experience. It has had satisfaction from 
the act. If this is repeated the whole reaction is 
intensified and made more sure. But even more; 
such repetition of stimulus, impulsive response, and 
satisfaction results in three most important things 
on the inside of personaHty: (1) the habit of respond- 



Some Essential Natural Elements 35 

ing in this way when this stimulus is applied; (2) 
the reinforcement of the impulse until it becomes a 
positive desire or appetite; and (3) ultimately through 
consciousness and memory the formation of knowl- 
edge or free ideas about sucking and its rewards. On 
the other hand, if something disagreeable or nauseat- 
ing were given to the child every time it sucked, 
without doubt the whole sucking reflex could be 
broken up and a habit of refusing to suck formed, and 
an association with the act of ideas of aversion instead 
of pleasure. This simple series of events and their 
results are at the basis of all education and serve to 
build up the more complex elements of personality 
which we come to have. 

While habits are formed, impulses modified, and 
ideas developed by repeating such experiences, it is 
interesting to notice that formation of habits in early 
life takes place faster than the formation of ideas. 
The child has builded up many good and bad habits 
through its responding, long before it can gain enough 
free ideas through experience to enable it to control 
its choices thereby. Indeed this is largely the object 
of our ordinary instruction, — to furnish to the young 
at once the knowledge which the race has accumulated 
through its experience, so as to save the child the 
necessity of going through all the experience and of 
forming all the habits that would supply it with these 
ideas. 

As habits, desires, and ideas are built up within, 
other internal factors besides the mere raw, inherited 



36 Use of Motives 

instincts thus come to take part in determining what 
choices and responses shall be made to the various 
stimuh. PersonaUty is growing. The instincts them- 
selves are in process of change, and they are producing 
still other qualities that will further modify and 
control them. It is no longer true that we are wholly 
creatures of our instincts or of the surroundings. 
Ideas and habits and, later, judgment and ideals and 
standards are developed by experience, and play their 
part. More and more these newer and higher results 
of experience take the act of choosing out of the 
almost mechanical, instinctive place it has in early 
childhood and in the lower animals; they make it 
more complex, more full of meaning, more character- 
ful. The choices of the young child have no moral 
value whatever. It is because of these newer qualities 
that choices come to have moral and rehgious meaning. 
The example of the sucking child will serve us 
again. It may be that the child has formed the bad 
habit of sucking its thumb, and this has persisted for 
some years. Now the sucking impulse and reaction 
is normally a rather fleeting one. It ought to serve 
its purpose and practically be lost in a few months. 
But repetition and habit have strengthened its hold. 
It is kept up because it furnishes a certain accustomed 
satisfaction. The child will choose and continue this 
line of conduct until some other factors counteract 
these old forces in control of choice. We may try to 
supply these other factors by placing stalls on the 
fingers, by putting quinine on them, or other similar 



Some Essential Natural Elements 37 

device. In such cases we are wanting to substitute a 
discomfort for the satisfaction and thus get the usual 
action checked or inhibited. Or we may arouse the 
child's consciousness to the fact that people in general 
disapprove of such conduct and that it is losing the 
good opinion of others thereby. If its desire for the 
approval of others is sufficiently strong we may get 
an inhibition by introducing a stronger and higher 
desire. In the same way rewards and punishments or 
ideas of right and wrong may set up inhibitions that 
will enable the child to modify its choice. 

Diagram 2 will illustrate how these various factors 
which influence choice arise out of the primitive 
instinctive impulses and experiences, and then com- 
pete with these same instincts for the control of choice 
and conduct, — all for the enrichment and complica- 
tion of the steps that lie between stimulus and re- 
sponse. 

DISCUSSION OF FIGURE 2 

This diagram suggests some steps in the development of 
personality. With the beginnings indicated in Fig. 1, we are 
sure to get an instinctive response from certain stimuli. After 
such a response the organism is not the same again. It has had 
an experience. If the action gave comfort or satisfaction^ it would 
be hkely to be repeated under similar conditions. If not, it 
would be less likely to be repeated. Action thus reacts in per- 
sonality in the form of satisfaction or dissatisfaction. (Follow 
the course of the arrows.) Furthermore there are many of these 
internal tendencies and impulses. That which is strongest at 
the moment will win against the others. Experience and satis- 
faction will help determine whether this stronger impulse will 
become still stronger and continue to win, or be made less power- 



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Some Essential Natural Elements 39 

ful and possibly be inhibited next time. Satisfactions reinforcing 
the impulses raise these latter into positive desires or appetites. 
Consciousness and memory and anticipation give these desires a 
powerful place in life and lead to purposes. Satisfying experi- 
ences repeated produce habits and ideas. By knowledge, the 
power of reason, and the force of habit, standards are erected 
within. Standards fused with desires give ideals. All of these 
have much to do in determining action through their effects on 
choice, decision, and will. Purpose is virtually a general choice, 
not yet carried into effect, or delayed, — a kind of attitude or 
prejudice in favor of a certain line of action. It is complex in its 
origin, made up of many of the steps described above. In turn 
it becomes a living medium which strengthens or vetoes the 
special appeals that strive within us to influence choice. 

The diagram also suggests that, whereas at the outset stimuli 
can appeal only to the native impulses, after this personal 
development has taken place, appeal may be made directly to 
conscious desires and through ideas and thinking. 

6. Structure of mature personality. 

Broadly speaking, our mature and completed per- 
sonality is built up about these three functions which 
we have been discussing: (1) the reception and 
appreciation of stimuli; (2) the choice of response in 
the light of the total effect of these stimuli on the 
individual; and (3) the response itself. We have 
been maintaining that the chief problem in the edu- 
cation of personality is so to develop it that it will 
desire and be able to make the right choice of responses 
under all combinations of stimulation and internal 
desires. It is now necessary to examine a little more 
closely the factors in us that help to determine choice. 
At the outset it is largely the internal desires, and the 



40 Use of Motives 

immediate appeals to them through the senses, that 
settle choices. In mature life determination of choice 
becomes much more complex, though the essential 
conditions remain the same. 

The accompanying diagram (Fig. 3), which must 
be thought of merely as a diagram and not a real 
picture of anything, attempts to show to the eye 
some of the more important factors in this reaction 
of the person to the surroundings. On the extreme 
left we imagine the environment with all its varied 
stimuli. On the right are the activities and behavior 
that make up the response. The rectangle itself 
portrays the individual. This individual connects 
or associates the stimulus and the response. It 
furnishes not only the paths for the passage of the 
impulses, but reinforcements or inhibitions of them as 
well. 

DISCUSSION OF FIGURE 3 

This diagram shows some points in the structure and operation 
of mature personahty. (Compare with Fig. 2.) Personality has 
three main parts: (1) the receiving portion (receptors) that looks 
out on stimuli (attention and appreciation are its great functions) ; 
(2) a responding side (effectors) that looks toward behavior or 
response; and (3) that which lies between stimulus and response 
whose function is to correlate and adjust behavior to stimulus. 
This third region is where our real personal values lie. This is 
where we grow most. We may possibly improve the reception 
of stimuli and certainly the skill of our responses ; but our greatest 
gain is within. We have at the beginning only the instinctive 
impulses and desires. We have seen in Fig. 2 how these gradually 
give rise to the complex internal conditions of maturity. There 
are at maturity three great groups of internal quahties by which 



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42 Use of Motives 

we can appeal to choice: (1) the impulses^ which are what we 
inherit, plus whatever change has come to them from our experi- 
ences; (2) the desires that we build up as the result of the opera- 
tion of increasing consciousness acting upon our impulses, satis- 
factions, etc.; (3) the ideas and the powers of intellect and reason 
that come to us through teaching or through experience. These 
three things acting singly or together are the chief positive 
sponsors and inspirers of choices and actions. While ideas and 
the power of using them come from experience, it is possible by- 
teaching (a form of stimulus) to impart ideas which are not the 
outcome of the experience of the individual. There is often a real 
conflict between ideas (judgment) and desires, and ideas may 
retard or inhibit the natural effect of desires on choice. This is 
the point at which life becomes moral. Habits, standardized 
modes of thinking, feeling and acting; standards, chiefly a matter 
of knowledge and judgment; ideals, made up both of ideas and 
desires; and purposes, which are really delayed responses, may 
reinforce or inhibit the various appeals to choice. Which they 
do depends upon the factors that have made them^ in the history 
of the individual. All these various contents of personality are 
open to education. We are confining ourselves too largely to the 
training of the intellectual (ideas) and to skill in expression. 
More attention must be given to the development of right im- 
pulses and desires as well, that these may replace the poorer ones. 
The arrows in this figure show the general course of the in- 
fluence of the various factors, and not their development as in 
Fig. 2. It will be noticed that desire and satisfaction are emotions 
which influence choice and conduct; but at the same time they 
also look out toward the income. For example, hunger and curiosity 
are receptive emotions rather than expressive, although they do 
lead incidentally to action as a means of realization. 



One aspect of the person looks out toward stim- 
ulus. It seeks and receives. This includes the senses, 
through which the external stimuli reach the person, 



Some Essential Natural Elements 48 

and the internal desires and appreciations that make 
the incoming impressions appealing or the reverse. 
On the other side, looking out toward action and 
behavior, is the apparatus of responding. Response 
is merely a matter of muscular action for the most 
part, though back of it are the great personal acts of 
choosing and deciding. These two sides, — the 
receiving and the responding, — taken thus simply 
together, are known as the sensori-motor apparatus. 
The normal result of a stimulus on the sensory side 
is a response on the motor side. Income naturally 
expects outgo. Impression should be followed by 
expression. This is the normal reaction. But it 
makes a great deal of difference just what behavior 
shall follow from the stimulus furnished by a par- 
ticular situation; from a simple stimulus or from a 
complex combination of stimuli. Will it be right or 
wrong? good or bad? and what decides the goodness 
or badness of a response? The inner core of per- 
sonality lying between the receiving and the respond- 
ing parts is responsible for the real character of the 
responses. This demands our careful study. 

7. Choice is the critical thing in personality. 

In such a personality as we have been describing 
it is in choosing how to act that the individual really 
expresses himself. Here the sum total of external 
influences, of internal desires, of instincts, of knowl- 
edge, of habits, and of ideals are balanced, and the 
personality expresses its real self by deciding what to 
do. This is not a special faculty, but is the whole of 



44 Use of Motives 

personality at a critical stage in its work. While in 
other persons we can see actions only, and can read 
choices only by these actions, it is choosing or 
wilHng which really measures the character of the 
person. This is the point where the personality shows 
the degree of its appreciation of all its own varied 
resources to determine its action. It is clear then, as 
we have said, that the education in the making of 
right choices is the objective point of all moral and 
religious training. The morality of any being comes 
out in this moment of choosing in the light of all the 
resources of the person. If this act is wrong, nothing 
else can count for right. It is immoral to make any 
other than the best possible choice. Moral efficiency 
is really shown by the disposition, the ability, and the 
habit of making right, — that is to say the best, — 
choices. How then can we as teachers reach in and 
develop this power and disposition toward righteous 
choice? 

8. Two chief ways of influencing choice. 

This crowning power which must be developed is 
purely within. We have no power of reaching it 
directly from without. Furthermore, it is the essential 
mark of choice that, to have any meaning, it must be 
one's own. Hence, if we could force choices directly 
from without, the result would have no personal value 
to the individual. It is even more true of choosing 
than of the other personal powers that they develop 
through self-activity; because choosing is, as has been 
said, the most distinctive act of the self. 



Some Essential Natural Elements 45 

In reality there are two objects in view in getting 
choices: there is the task of getting the right indi- 
vidual, isolated choices, and that of getting the habit 
and disposition of right choosing. The latter is of 
course the great purpose. There is, however, no 
way to get the habit of right choosing other than 
through practise in right choosing. This means 
repeating the individual choices until the habit is 
fixed. 

In the task of guiding or influencing choice in such 
a way as to insure that the self shall still be the actual 
chooser, there are just two ways of proceeding: (1) 
by changing the stimuli (that is, by varying the 
impressions we bring to bear, — the teaching, ex- 
ample, influence, appeals to the various internal 
impulses, and the Uke, — we can so modify the steps 
that lead up to choice as to influence its character) ; 
or (2) the responses or behavior may be changed in 
various external ways, and in this way the habits and 
other steps leading up to choices may be educated, 
because conduct reacts on all the steps leading up to it. 
Choices are educated by action and by the experiences 
growing out of action just as really as by impression. 
The act of choosing develops the power and disposition 
to choose and guides future choices. Both the 
process of stimulation or instructing and the guidance 
of actions are valuable methods of educating choices. 
They are complementary. 

9. Training choices by impression. 

This is the classic mode of teaching. It implies 



46 Use of Motives 

bringing information, appeals, and examples, and so 
presenting all this that the original desires and in- 
stincts may be modified through new desires con- 
nected with the development of knowledge, reasoning, 
standards and ideals. At the outset some of the 
instinctive impulses and desires are strong, and ideas 
are wanting. By giving prematurely these ideas from 
the stock of human experience we can change the 
nature of the total appeal to personality and modify 
choices. Only in this way can we bring the whole of 
God's work in history to bear upon the life of today. 
It is the way whereby we make the example of pres- 
ent-day heroes influence the lives of the young. It 
is the method of literature, of poetry, of biography, 
of appeal, of exhortation, of instruction. It is of 
course essential that all this shall be done suitably 
and in a graded way. 

In our Sunday-school work we have for the most 
part stopped at this point. We have striven to reach 
the emotions and the purposes by making the stimuli 
as suitable and as convincing as possible. This is 
all very valuable and important, but it is not enough. 
We have found that we do not hold to permanent 
moral and religious choices fifty per cent of those who 
enter our Sunday schools. 

10. Training choices through expression. 

Choice is built up from instincts, experiences, 
habits, ideas and the like, but it also looks out on 
conduct. We have found out in secular education 
that we '^ learn by doing.'' This is the reason why 



Some Essential Natural Elements 47 

we teach biology by field and laboratory work rather 
than by a text-book merely. This is the meaning of 
clinics in medical schools, practise teaching in normal 
schools, and shops and laboratories everywhere. The 
response which personality makes to conditions does 
more to educate it than any amount of instruction can 
do without response. While choice is influenced by 
the knowledge and desires which lead to it, choice 
really looks forward into action and response and 
satisfaction, rather than backward. What we do 
therefore reacts upon our choices. Choice cannot 
escape the consequences of its failure or success as 
measured by the results of action. The test of the 
Tightness and wrongness of the choice is found in the 
total experiences and satisfactions connected with the 
outcome. If choices give satisfaction, on the whole, 
they are likely to be repeated. If they bring dis- 
comfort they are not Hkely to be repeated. Thus it 
comes about that the actions growing out of our 
choices educate us most profoundly and automa- 
tically. 

In our Sunday schools definite effort to insure right 
choices through expressive work, designed to give 
practical exercise in the art of choosing right, is all 
but unknown. Practise of right choosing and acting 
in response to our teaching is left largely to chance. 
There is no question that we must find a way to 
secure moral expression of choice in right and fine 
actions if we are going to succeed in moral and reUgious 
education. 



48 Use of Motives 

11. Real moral teaching involves both impression and 
expression. 

We have seen that the common and classical method 
of teaching, both secular and rehgious, has been 
largely that of making appeals, giving instruction, 
producing impressions, — leaving the practical appli- 
cation of this teaching to Ufe largely to unconscious 
and haphazard surroundings. We have thought that 
our impressions would last, — forgetting that an 
impression which works through to a satisfactory 
expression much outlasts any other sort. In many 
secular types of education we have seen a very strik- 
ing revolt toward the more practical method of 
teaching by practise, — of learning by doing. The re- 
volt against the dead languages and some of the older 
subjects and in favor of the sciences and the voca- 
tional subjects is not merely because of the direct 
utility of the subjects, but in part because the latter 
evoke a more complete and practical personal reac- 
tion. They provide for expression. 

Without doubt both methods of teaching have 
great values; but each is full of weakness standing 
alone. Perfect teaching involves giving the best 
possible stimulus in the way of appeals, instruction, 
impression, and then finding ways to see that these 
new elements of mcome, if accepted by personality, 
are consciously caused to express themselves until 
the power of choice is strengthened by the satis- 
factions of right behavior. In right teaching there is 
thus a complete personal reaction: (1) impression; 



Some Essential Natural Elements 49 

(2) self -active choice; and (3) the expression of this 
choice in action. It is in this way that actual adjust- 
ment of the internal nature is made to the external 
conditions. Personality is kept appreciative of its 
income, able to make right choices, and responsive to 
the conditions of life. 

12. Results of impression and expression on the 
other internal qualities. 

This complete mental reaction spoken of in the 
preceding paragraph increases through repetition the 
strength and certainty of choice, but it also educates 
other internal qualities, that help insure the soundness 
of later choices. Desires, for example, look out toward 
the objects that stimulate and attract, — as clothes, 
foods, property. But equally, desires look forward 
to choice and action and satisfactions coming from 
action. For example, one's desire may look distinctly 
toward work or play, or to some other active form of 
satisfaction quite as much as to the satisfactions 
of the senses. The act of choosing and the pride of 
right choice may become a positive desire and source 
of comfort. Because of these things the very act of 
choosing, in a complete mental reaction, is going to 
increase or diminish these original desires that lead 
up to choice. 

In a quite similar way the experience that comes 
from this complete personal reaction is stored, as we 
have seen, in the form of habits and ideas. Habit is 
a conservative quality and tends to make choices 
which at first are difficult and very conscious, auto- 



60 Use of Motives 

matically sure and certain. That is to say, habits 
tend to give to our consciously acquired choices some 
of the sureness which our primitive instinctive choices 
had at the beginning of Ufe. Ideas, knowledge, and 
judgment that come from chosen hues of action are 
also sure to modify the internal desires, and later 
choices. Finally, we cannot be stimulated and re- 
spond without having certain modifications of our 
standards or ideals of conduct. Gradually our whole 
purposes are colored by this process. All these 
changes within us, brought about by our chosen lines 
of action, in their turn profoundly influence all later 
choices. Right choosing followed by satisfaction 
not alone educates choice and action, but it educates 
all those guiding qualities of personality that lead up 
to and influence the choices. 

From this concrete, but incomplete, picture of the 
action of personaUty the teacher will readily see that 
we are largely neglecting the more important half of 
moral and religious education, namely, the expres- 
sive side, even in those Sunday schools where the 
impressive work is of the best. What we must learn 
to do is to couple completely graded instruction with 
completely graded expression in moral and religious 
matters. Impression without suitable expression in 
morals and religion gives a theoretical hold on both 
which is liable to be at once hypocritical and snob- 
bish; expression without adequate instruction leads 
to formalism, Uteralism, and to behavior unco- 
ordinated with the best standards of the race. 



Some Essential Natural Elements 51 

Topics for Further Study and Discussion 

1. Show how our response to our environment 
changes us. Enumerate some of the internal changes 
that come from responding to our stimuH. If one is 
stimulated to deep anger, illustrate how the choices 
and actions we make (responses) modify us for all 
time. 

2. Some of the important values lie in the fact that 
for the most part even humans must adjust their 
lives properly to meet their surroundings, rather than 
the reverse. 

3. What is there for us educationally in the other 
side of the truth? Human beings can in some degree 
change their surroundings. They can move away 
from trouble, poverty, crime, temptation, etc, 

4. Define education in terms of adjustment: 
to gravity, to food and drink, to other people, to 
truth, to right, to duty, to God. Why, in becoming 
adjusted, are we disposed to lose adjustability? 

5. Evidences that we really inherit impulses, in- 
stincts, tendencies, temperament, disposition, mental 
and spiritual capacities, and the like. 

Suggestive Questions 

Why must organisms, including humans, become 
adapted to external conditions? In what ways may 
we become adapted to cold? To new neighbors? 
To bad companions? To trouble? To new truth? 
What are the essentials of right choice and of wrong 



52 Use of Motives 

choice? Why is choice such an important thing? 
Why is it such a measure of character? Why is it 
even a better index than action? Give evidences, 
from your knowledge of young children, that it is 
easy to form whole groups of bad (or good) habits 
before the child could possibly get from experience 
the ideas that would help him prevent (or encourage) 
the habits. What are the corollaries of this fact in 
human life? Why is it peculiarly essential that 
choices shall be determined as much as possible /rom 
the inside ? 

Some Practical Problems 

1. The early formation of habits in babies. Do 
you think it possible to control in very large degree 
the formation of habits in very young children: 
e.g., habits of sleeping; of feeding; of crying or not 
crying; of lying quietly or being taken up; of obedi- 
ence; of confidence; of consideration for others; of 
expression of affection? What are the necessary 
steps? Why do we so often fail? Do you believe this 
has any relation to morals and religion? Can the 
Sunday school be of any help to parents, present and 
future, at this point ? 

2. When a strong native impulse is appealed to 
by an attractive external situation, choice is sure. 
Give some concrete illustrations of this. If the situ- 
ation is undesirable, how can we overcome it? How 
can we use the fact stated above for educational 
purposes? 



Some Essential Natural Elements 63 

3. Let young men **Sow their wild oats" (?)• 
Such advice simply means to let youth indulge its 
internal impulses, with little or no external help, and 
build up the bad habits that flow from such choices; 
feeling reasonably sure that ultimately ideas will 
grow up from these experiences that will cause the 
youth to realize that they do not really satisfy. Then 
he will try to break up the bad habits because of his 
convictions, and make his choices in the light of his 
own results. Analyze this concrete suggestion; show 
why it is vicious; suggest what is the sane procedure 
of adults. Apply the principle to the education of 
children generally. 

References 

Bagley: Educational Values. The Macmillan Co., 

N. Y. $1.50 
DuBois: The Natural Way. Fleming H. Revell 

Co., N. Y. $1.25 
Galloway: Biology of Sex for Parents and Teachers. 

D. C. Heath & Co., N. Y. .75 
Weigh: The Pupil and the Teacher. Lutheran 

Publication Society, Philadelphia. .50 



CHAPTER IV 

THE PRINCIPLE OF MOTIVATION IN EDU- 
CATION 

1. The impelling nature of desires in life. 

We have seen in the preceding chapter that the 
natural instincts, impulses, and desires which come 
to us through inheritance are the earliest spurs to 
conduct in childhood. These desires all point to 
satisfactions, and inspire to action by which the self 
is builded up. They are essentially selfish therefore. 
They include desire for food, desire for comfort, 
desire for action, for possession, and the like. These 
desires drive us as humans to do what we do. 
These impulses, and others which succeed and sup- 
plement and replace them through education and 
growth, furnish our motive power all through life. 
They are close to what we call *^ motives." It is be- 
cause of these internal desires and impulses that out- 
side influences have any appeal to us and arouse us to 
definite choices and actions. Through desires, knowl- 
edge and standards become fused into ideals and 
purposes. 

2. These natural impulses and desires are legitimate. 
Even among intelligent people it has been felt that 

these initial primitive desires and instincts of man 

5S 



00 Use of Motives 

must be of the devil, and intrinsically evil; that they 
must therefore be combated, and changed or eradi- 
cated. Their sole value has been thought to lie in 
the fact that they furnish the individual something 
to struggle against, and thus lead indirectly to charac- 
ter. It has been considered that there must be some- 
thing wrong therefore in those things which people do 
spontaneously and joyously, and some special virtue 
in doing things that are disagreeable and distasteful. 
On the contrary, it is the view of the modern student 
of education that every one of these early impulses 
and desires may make sound and valuable contri- 
butions to the growing personality; that they are 
given us by God and exist for this very purpose. 
They represent the best contribution which the 
past, through inheritance, has made to us. To be 
sure they all look toward personal gratification and 
are therefore selfish. But it is because of this very 
promise of gratification that they incite us to action. 
Thus they contribute directly to the building up of 
the self; and the development of self -hood is the first 
step in personal growth. It is true that these desires 
and impulses may be over-used and run riot and be- 
come destructive of sound personality; but this is 
in no wise an argument against their proper function- 
ing. 

3. The attitude of the educator toward these desires. 

If this view of the purpose and value of the in- 
stinctive impulses is correct, it is quite clear that the 
duty of the educator and his method of work will be 



The Principle of Motivation 67 

very different from what is common under the older 
view. It becomes his task to use and appeal to these 
desires and tendencies, rather than to repress them, as 
they appear and become functional in the individual, 
in order that each may make its right contribution to 
character. The proper use of them impKes several 
things. Some of the instincts are rightfully transient, 
and ought to be allowed to make their contribution 
and then give way to higher ones. This is true of 
the sucking impulse. Take for example, also, the 
impulse to fight or the instinct of fear. We will all 
allow that neither of these in its original crude form 
should become a strong permanent state of mind in 
a socialized individual; and yet both impulses can 
be shown to have certain value in character if allowed 
to play only in emergencies and gradually to pass 
away through disuse, or be transformed into some- 
thing higher and more permanent. To over-use and 
over-stress either of these would lead it to a strength 
which would be unwholesome. 

Other impulses should persist, but naturally should 
diminish in strength with the fuller development of 
character. Such are the desire for ownership, the 
spirit of rivalry, and the like. Still others, equally 
natural and instinctive, ought to grow and develop, 
though often changed in content, all through life. 
Such are curiosity, desire for leadership, the impulse 
to share and serve, together with many others. The 
genius of all these is that they give impulse and 
pleasure and satisfaction to action and thus tend to 



58 Use of Motives 

secure the repetition of the choices and actions which 
they inspire. It is the task of the teacher to try to 
understand these various natural motives to action, 
know when they should appear in life, know what 
contribution we should expect from each, and find 
out how to cause them so to weaken or increase as will 
be best for right character. Some should be fostered 
and coaxed, stressed and enriched by continual 
practise; some require only a start and should be 
emphasized only during certain very limited periods 
of life; some should be kept dormant or allowed to 
go into disuse; some should be smothered or have 
more permanent desires substituted for them as 
promptly as possible after they have done their 
work; some should be repressed by the early culti- 
vation of inhibitive tendencies. 

6. The meaning of motivation. 

All of this convinces the modern educator that we 
get more physical, mental, moral, and spiritual growth 
and development out of those activities that appeal 
to the natural impulses and thus give pleasure and 
satisfaction. We deny that there is anything of value 
in making activities unattractive and forbidding. 
Any subject or situation will contribute to the edu- 
cation of the child in proportion to the naturalness 
and intensity of the motives driving the child to the 
task. Everything we do for people or that they do 
for themselves will have its value increased if it 
appeals powerfully to some of their strong and natural 
desires, instincts, and tendencies. 



The Principle of Motivation 59 

The reasons for the superiority of these results He 
in the fact that, in this way, the child is more com- 
pletely enhsted; it has more zest and enthusiasm; 
its concentration and control of its whole nature, 
both receptive and active, is greater; there is less 
Ukelihood of arousing antagonism against the wishes 
of the parent or teacher and thus dissipating power; 
better attention means better retention and assimila- 
tion and mastery of facts, and more complete skill. 
All this implies that the first task of a teacher in any 
realm, in order to get best results, is to find what will 
arouse, on the part of the child, the greater interest 
in, and the most vital motives for undertaking and 
mastering, any task. It means first of all to get the 
child really to desire to do the thing. It means that 
everything shall be planned so that the child shall 
have, if it is possible, an immediate, a real, and natural 
satisfaction both in the doing and in the result when 
it is done. This is what the school men mean by 
motivation. It involves self-activity through internal 
motives which must be those most real and vital to 
the child at his grade of development. 

This by no means suggests that the student is 
never to do anything difficult or disagreeable, or that 
all such tasks are to be made artificially pleasant and 
easy. The thing we seek is internal and not external. 
It does mean, however, that no real pedagogical end 
is ever gained by making a naturally easy or interest- 
ing task artificially difficult, since there are enough 
such already to serve every purpose. It does mean 



60 Use of Motives 

that there is great loss in having any task so distaste- 
ful that internal motives sufficient for its accomplish- 
ment cannot be found. It means that the pupil and 
teacher must find for every disagreeable and difficult 
task some natural motives in the life of the child 
which will make it seem worth while to overcome the 
difficulty, and thus make for more total satisfaction 
in the doing. Motivation consists not in diminishing 
the task but in increasing the motive for performing 
the task and the satisfaction in the result. It does 
not mean to make tasks more easy, but to make 
them more appealing. We must select tasks that 
appeal to present motives, and develop motives that 
will meet necessary tasks. This is exactly the dif- 
ference between play and drudgery. Normally play 
is sufficiently motivated. To the young child work 
must be motivated or it is drudgery. The object of 
motivation is to prevent drudgery, not to eHminate 
work. Difficulty properly motivated is very educa- 
tive; drudgery is not. 

5. Relation of ^^ motivation " to some other watch- 
words of the teacher. 

It will be seen at once by teachers who have kept 
in touch with educational ideas that motivation is 
closely related to several fruitful doctrines of recent 
times. The '' doctrine of interest,'^ the '^ point of 
contact in teaching,^' ^^ making the pupil central/' 
and '' gradation '' are all akin to the principle of 
motivation. The latter, however, means more than 
any or all of them as usually understood. It points 



The Principle of Motivation 61 

to an active, conscious, and systematic use of all the 
driving internal motives of childhood and youth to 
arouse interest and to furnish contact. 

The principles underlying the grading of our lessons 
both in school and Sunday school are closely related 
to motivation. It is the uniform testimony of those 
who have intelligently used the graded Sunday-school 
lessons that they are more easily motivated than the 
old uniform lessons. Motivation means rather more 
than we usually include in gradation. Complete 
gradation in education means the gradation of the 
matter of instruction, of the method of its presentation, 
of the form of the expression resulting from the in- 
struction, of the emotional appeals, and of the satis^ 
factions that flow from the action. Long ago we 
recognized that the general method of instruction 
must be graded to the state of development of the 
child. Even the uniform Sunday-school lessons 
recognized this. The recent grading of our Sunday- 
school lessons is an effort to grade the matter to the 
development of intelligence. As yet we have done 
practically nothing in moral and religious education 
to find the modes of expression which are thoroughly 
suited to the personal internal states of developing 
children. Motivation is really an effort to grade the 
choices and activities of child life to the states of 
emotional development and to the personal satis- 
factions of which the child is capable. Some day we 
shall understand that it is even more important to 
grade our appeals to emotions, to motives, and for 



62 Use of Motives 

expression than it is to suit matter to the intellectual 
capacity of the child. 

It is not the purpose to imply that the fundamental 
idea in motivation is new, or that we have done 
nothing in this regard in the past. All good teachers 
have in some degree unconsciously recognized the 
need and tried to meet it. What we have recently 
come to see is the vital necessity of finding and using 
in a dehberate and conscious way all the strong 
emotions and impulses that are most dominant and 
worth cultivating in the nature of the child at the 
various stages of its development. Motivation has 
been artificial and half-hearted; it must become 
genuine and natural and thoroughgoing. 

6. The two-fold test of the value of a natural impulse. 
As suggested above, the doctrine of motivation does 
not imply that all impulses are of equal value. In 
estimating whether we should appeal to certain 
youthful motives and desires in getting the whole- 
hearted aUiance of the child, at least two things must 
be taken into account. In the first place, we must 
decide upon the efficiency of any particular impulse 
in accompKshing the immediate response we seek. 
For example, fear might be the most effective possible 
motive in securing a particular Une of conduct. It 
might be that love or desire to serve would not obtain 
the proper conduct at all. While present in some 
degree they might not be strong enough to insure right 
choices. And yet, in spite of this, it does not follow 
that fear, although an efficient motive, would be the 



The Principle of Motivation 63 

best to use. We must consider, in the second place, 
what would be the permanent result in the quality 
of personality from the use and development of this 
particular motive. In other wordS; while we must 
look for immediate outer results in our appeal to 
motives, it is even more important that we recognize 
the final reaction in personality of the exercise of any 
one of the instinctive qualities. Two desires or im- 
pulses may be equally efficient for getting immediate 
and enthusiastic response in children, but may be 
very different in their reaction on the inner springs of 
character. It is for this reason that we must have 
intelligent and sympathetic and scientific study of 
these vital motives, rather than trust to the mere 
external and apparent results. 

7. An enumeration of some of the principal impulses, 
instincts and desires that furnish motives in life. 

Many efforts have been made by educators to 
classify these tendencies in our natures, but none of 
them is entirely satisfactory. We shall not undertake 
to do anything more than to make a rough grouping 
of some of those which are most to be used by us in 
our efforts to educate in accordance with the threefold 
division of personality we have been using. Instincts 
may relate primarily (1) to the receiving side, or to the 
income of the individual; or (2) to the states within the 
individual; or (3) to the activities or expressions of the 
individual. The first have to do with receiving stimuli, 
the second with the internal states of mind whereby 
we interpret and estimate values and influence choices, 



04 Use of Motives 

and the third with the response to the stimuli of the 
environment. In strict truth most instincts tend to 
contribute to all three of these aspects of the indi- 
vidual, and all involve action as their normal outcome. 

(1) The natural, instinctive qualities that make for 
the reception and income. These are desires^ not nec- 
essarily for action, but also for stimulus and reception. 
In this group we would class (a) curiosity or the 
desire for knowledge which is the foundation of the 
getting of all knowledge, (6) the desire for possessions 
or the instinct of ownership (close to this is the 
instinct to make collections of various things); (c) 
the desire for approbation; and (d) the desire to be en* 
tertained; and many others of even more primitive sort. 

(2) The instincts and impulses or tendencies that 
look chiefly to the internal personal states and atti- 
tudes. Among these we may mention (a) fear^ which 
grows partly out of inexperience and uncertainty and 
is related to distrust, aversion and hatred; (6) confi^ 
dence and trustfulness, leading under proper exercise 
to sympathy, love, and kindred attitudes; (c) spirit 
of obedience or acceptance of authority; (d) the 
opposite impulse of contrariness or self-assertion; (e) 
imagination, which is one of the most valuable and 
pleasant capabilities of childhood; (/) anger; (g) 
feeling of rivalry; (h) the sense of comfort or dis- 
comfort, satisfaction or dissatisfaction. They modify 
action rather than induce it directly. 

(3) The impulses that lead directly toward expres- 
sion. In one way or another all the instincts men- 



The Principle of Motivation 60 

tioned in (1) and (2) may lead toward action, though 
not necessarily so. While curiosity may produce 
action on our part, the action is only a means to an 
end. The real desire is for income, not for action. 
This is the goal of most impulses, — either to produce 
action or to prevent it. There are, however, numerous 
instincts and tendencies that are pecuharly inspiring 
to responses. Some of these are : (a) a native restless- 
ness, which is fundamentally physiological and is 
seen in most children. It leads to nervous and muscu- 
lar activity just as curiosity looks toward information; 
(6) the instinct of repetition, which is quite universal 
and shows itself in the desire to hear again or to do 
again the things that have given satisfaction; (c) 
the play instinct, which is very powerful in children 
and is being used more and more skilfully by teachers; 
(d) the impulse to talk, by the exercise of which the 
child makes great intellectual progress in the first 
few years of his Ufe; {e) the passion to be doing things, 
either destructive or constructive, growing in part out 
of restlessness and curiosity; (/) the closely related 
combative ov fighting impulse; (g) the instinct of leader- 
ship and of mastery, expressed in the child's program 
in the desire to '' be it," and to overcome obstacles; 
(h) the impulse to share with others what one enjoys; 
(i) the '' gang '' or gregarious instinct which drives 
children to seek companions; (j) the impulse to 
" show off,'' which is related to the desire for appro- 
bation; (fc) the sex impulses. 
These are by no means all the natural instincts and 



66 Use of Motives 

desires which the child gets by inheritance and which 
furnish unreasoned motives for its early Ufe; but they 
are enough to enable us as teachers to see something 
of the range of quahties to which we may appeal as 
we try to build up character. These are found in 
some degree in all children, but not in the same 
degree in all. They are not of the same relative 
strength at different stages in one child. They are 
not character; but they are the inherited raw ma- 
terials out of which character is built. They are the 
chief incentives of childhood; indeed they furnish 
the leading motives for all human hfe and activity. 

8. Application of motivation in general education. 

In the pubhc schools we are now seeing a very 
intelhgent effort to use these primitive impulses of 
the child to assist in securing the right attitude of the 
young toward the work of the school, in order that 
they may receive, think, and respond rightly. In very 
early hfe we motivate much of the necessary work by 
giving it the form of a game and thus appeahng to 
the play instinct. Instead of memorizing meaningless 
names and positions in geography, the work is given 
meaning and just as much and as good information 
about the places is gained, through the device of 
travel stories. Instead of attacking history as an 
organized body of knowledge, with no consideration 
for the states of mind of the child, the start is made 
with problems that the child himself may wish to 
know, and thus his curiosity leads the way. The 
logical order is made to give way to the psychological. 



The Principle of Motivation 67 

It may be necessary again to reassure the reader 
who fears that we are merely trying to discover or 
make the oft-despaired-of royal road to learning and 
to life. There is no such intention. The contention 
merely is this: the road is quite difficult enough 
at best without making or keeping it unnecessarily 
so; a great deal of hard work is necessary to every 
traveler who gets on and such hard work has much 
value; but we have those impulses within us which 
will give zest to the journey and to all the work of it, 
if they can only be aroused; that the difficult road 
can be more satisfactorily traveled and the wayfarer 
may go further on it and most of all may get more 
pleasure and profit out of it, if he can have brought 
to his attention first these things that most appeal to 
him and thus arouse his interest in the things that 
originally seemed to have no appeal. It further is 
to be understood that the motivation which might 
seem most alluring to the mature mind is not that 
which serves a life purpose to the child mind. The 
doctrine of motivation insures that the road shall be 
considered as a pleasant and profitable highway for 
the child to get its development, and is not traveled 
either for the sake of the road or for the pleasure of 
those who have already traveled the road. 

Topics for Further Study and Discussion 

1. The age at which some of the important instincts 
appear. 



68 Use of Motives 

2. Other ways of classifying the instincts: e.g., 
Environmental, IndividuaUstic, Social, Sexual and 
Parental, Adaptive. 

3. Strong and weak points of the '* Doctrine of 
Interest." Point of contact in teaching. 

4. How does motivation add to these ideas? 

5. Devices which school teachers have used suc- 
cessfully to motivate English, History, Arithmetic, 
etc. 

6. Relation of motives to morals. 



Suggestive Questions 

Why is it short-sighted and wrong to assume that 
the natural impulses are evil? Is it sound on the 
other hand to hold that we should follow them 
blindly? What then is the pedagogical attitude? 
Are you really ready to practise your own answer in 
your work? Mention some instincts that should pass 
away with infancy. Mention some that should more 
gradually wane. Mention some that should grow 
stronger throughout hfe. How is the attitude and 
practise of the teacher modified by his view of the 
nature of the instincts? Why is it difficult to classify 
the instincts satisfactorily? Is there a single one of 
these inner impulses that does not have something 
to do with our choices and morals? What is sug- 
gested by the fact that such a large proportion of our 
instincts look toward activity? 



The Principle of Motivation 69 

Some Peactical Problems 

1. The kind of man one becomes at maturity de- 
pends very largely upon the native instinctive im- 
pulses that have been selected, emphasized, and 
developed by his parents, his teachers, and himself. 
Suppose two children have the same impulses to 
start with. One from the beginning is encouraged to 
indulge every physical appetite, to use no restraint 
over temper, and cultivates greed, jealousy, rivalry, 
and hate. The other from the beginning has the 
emotions of sympathy and confidence encouraged, is 
allowed to share in the pleasures of unselfishness and 
service, is induced for the sake of the approval of 
those he loves to forego self-indulgence and find 
pleasure in self-mastery. What will be the differences 
in the mature character of the men? 

2. We can so motivate conduct as to emphasize 
and strengthen any of the instincts and attitudes that 
we really desire our children to have. How can this 
be done in such a way as to develop obedience? The 
desire to serve? The impulse to share? Sympathy 
for the less fortunate? Extend the list. 

3. The coupling of impulses. What practical 
value is there in coupling the weaker, desirable im- 
pulses with stronger ones? For example, could you 
devise ways to strengthen the weaker impulse of 
obedience by coupling it with curiosity or desire for 
approval, or the instinct of leadership? What motives 
could you appeal to in order to increase the satis- 



70 Use of Motives 

faction of sharing or controlling anger, or being fair 
and honest in play? 

4. The gradual lessening of the power of certain 
instincts. Suggest practical devices to decrease the 
impulses of fear, rivalry, anger, fighting, greed, and 
the hke. 

References 

Athearn: The Church School. The Pilgrim Press, 
Boston. $1.00 

DeGarmo: Interest and Education. The Macmillan 
Co., N. Y. $1.00 

DuBois: The Point of Contact in Teaching. Dodd, 
Mead & Co., N. Y. .75 

Galloway: The Appeal to Motives in Religious Educa- 
tion in Encyclopedia of Sunday Schools and Relig- 
ious Education. Thomas Nelson & Sons, N. Y. 

Meyer: The Graded Sunday School in Principle and 
Practise. Methodist Book Concern, N. Y. .75 



CHAPTER V 

MOTIVATION IN SUNDAY-SCHOOL 
TEACHING 

1. Of what importance to the Sunday schools is this 
search for motives? 

We have seen that the general educator is coming 
to appreciate that any subject contributes to the 
development of the child just in proportion to the in- 
tensity of the internal motives with which the child 
comes to be drawn to the subject. The exercises, in 
which children are so interested that they put their 
whole natures, educate them more rapidly and pro- 
foundly than those in which they take no conscious 
satisfaction. This means that the first task in good 
teaching is to secure this attitude of complete en- 
thusiasm for the needful tasks. To do this we must 
go to work by way of the child's natural instincts, 
impulses, desires, and satisfactions. These are 
natural, God-given, and for a constructive purpose. 
There is no separating of these into animal and hu- 
man; physical and spiritual; good and bad. No 
one of them can be properly used and developed with- 
out ministering to the whole of life. No one of them 
can be misused without making more difficult that 
balanced hold on all of life which is the real meaning 
of religion. 

71 



72 Use of Motives 

Because of these things it is clear that we Sunday- 
school teachers will find here as much to help in our 
work as have the teachers of EngUsh or geography or 
history or science. Indeed there are certain reasons 
why it is more important for us to get an ally in the 
impulses and instincts of the child than it is for the 
ordinary teachers. If the public-school teachers, who 
can control the time and movements of the pupils 
for such a large part of their waking hours, feel the 
need of enlisting the aid of these natural motives to 
secure the results they seek, how much more do the 
Sunday schools need to secure this internal ally in 
the personahty of the pupil in order to overcome 
the handicaps under which we work. 

2. The impulses and religious education. 

If it is true, as is contended in this book, that the 
prime purpose of moral and religious education is 
so to equip the individual that he shall have the 
power and the disposition to make and execute right 
choices, it will be seen at once that these instincts, 
impulses, tendencies, desires and appetites, — in a 
word, the emotional sides of life — are tremendously 
important in religious development. The desires 
have a most profound influence on choice; much more 
than mere learning has. Unless these desires are 
right, the individual is under the necessity of going 
into every choice with a powerful internal enemy 
making right choice difl&cult. Knowledge and experi- 
ence alone, unless they find an ally in some powerful 
desires and instincts, will not serve to insure right 



Motivation in Sunday-School Teaching 73 

purpose and choice and behavior. More than any 
other realm of personaUty, the rehgious nature is 
powerfully supported or thwarted by the desires and 
impulses. 

3. The applicahility of motivation to moral and 
religious education. 

It follows from what has just been said that one 
of our most important tasks in religious education is 
to enlist the cooperation of just the right internal 
instincts and desires on the side of the right choices. 
The genius of religious instruction is not to make 
right choices distasteful and hard, but to secure the 
help of these internal impulses so that even the 
choices that would be difficult will yield more satis- 
faction than would result from following the easier 
way. Its aim is to develop desires of the higher order: 
" My son, give me thy heart.'' This is necessarily 
the course which religion must take in order to be 
secure and genuine. We must not trust to a combat 
between enlightened intelligence and unsound desires. 
If we can get intelligence and desires leading in the 
same direction, we insure the single right choices and 
thus the habit of right choosing. 

Desires and impulses which furnish motives to life 
are educated, enlarged, and refined by use; are dis- 
placed by others that give or promise better and fuller 
satisfactions; or may be lost wholly by disuse. 

The teacher who believes that these are at the 
bottom of moral and religious education does not 
regard any of these impulses as intrinsically bad or 



74 Use of Motives 

sinful. They are bad only when they outlive their 
usefulness, or are overdeveloped and applied in the 
wrong way so that they interfere with the maturing 
of the higher impulses in their turn. Curiosity, play- 
fulness, the desire to possess, the instinct of self- 
protection, self-assertion, the sex impulses and the 
like, are not bad. They lead to valuable results; 
they introduce fine elements in character; but there 
is no one of them which may not become wrong 
through over-use or misapplication. These lowly 
instincts are the raw materials of our moral and 
religious education. In such education it is our task 
to use the lower, simpler instincts and thus allow 
them to make their proper contribution, and gradually 
encourage the higher but equally natural impulses 
to take their place. Everything that is worth doing, 
— from service to self up to self-sacrifice for others 
and for God, — has within us natural impulses that 
make the thing appealing and give satisfaction in the 
doing. Religious motivation is the finding of the 
suitable internal impulses and using them to the full. 
It is the natural thing for the more selfish and self- 
assertive instincts to come to the center of the stage 
first; but these should gradually give way before the 
more unselfish and social instincts. The satisfaction 
of sacrifice is no less real or less natural than the 
satisfaction of self-assertion; but it is not so early 
a motive in life. 

It is because of these fundamental principles of 
human structure that we believe that a sound study 



Motivation in Sunday-School Teaching 75 

of motivation gives even more promise of regenerating 
moral and religious education than it has accom- 
plished in general education. 

4. Some practical reasons why an appeal to the 
natural motives of the child is necessary in Sunday 
schools. 

There are several classes of reasons why the Sun- 
day-school teachers need to give special attention to 
the task of arousing the best impulses and motives 
for the doing of the work asked for: partly because 
the use of motives is basal to all sound education; 
partly because moral and religious education is most 
important of all and is beset with special difficulties; 
partly because of the handicaps which lie in the 
looseness of the organization of the Sunday school; 
and partly in the mature and remote form in which 
most of our religious ideas are couched. Some of 
these we shall consider in detail. 

5. The use of motives is especially necessary because 
of the limited opportunity of the Sunday-school teacher. 

As suggested above, the Sunday school is poorly 
organized as a school. It is confined to a mere scrap 
of time; it cannot presuppose any extended home 
preparation of lessons; it cannot command the pupiFs 
time and attendance for even the half hour, except 
through the interest of the pupil. It is not remarkable 
under the circumstances that the Sunday school is not 
so efficient as we might wish. It is rather a tribute to 
the eternal worth and appeal of the thing we are doing 
that it is as efficient as it is. 



76 Use of Motives 

In spite of these handicaps we expect the Sunday 
school to secure the most fundamental educational 
results demanded in any part of our whole system of 
schools. Ordinarily in our schools we are satisfied 
if we can secure efficient knowledge of English or 
mathematics or manual training, and the like. Here, 
in the Sunday school, we are after efficiency in making 
righteous choices, the most difficult thing in life, very 
much more difficult than imparting knowledge. It 
is only the part of wisdom therefore to get every aid 
that modern pedagogy can bring. 

The plan of intensifying, and making internal and 
natural, the motives for doing the work has revolu- 
tionized many a class in English, history or geography; 
why may not similar wise use of the normal desires 
and motives of the child aid equally in this bigger 
task of developing Christlike character? 

6. The use of motives is peculiarly necessary in 
Sunday school because of the artificiality of much of 
our moral and religious teaching. 

As adults we have done very much the same thing 
in the planning of religious education that we have 
been doing in mathematics and grammar. We have 
organized the subject matter of all these topics in a 
way that seemed logical and suited to make a system 
comprehensible and satisfying to the adult mind. For 
many years in general education we have sacrificed 
our children to these logical and scientific systems of 
grammar and mathematics. Recently, however, we 
are coming to realize that the child mind does not 



Motivation in Sunday-School Teaching 77 

need a systematic treatise on language or numbers. 
The race didn't have anything of the sort to start 
with. They merely worked at numbers and language 
in a very simple, concrete way as they needed them 
incidentally in relation to whatever interested them 
in life. We now understand that this is the natural 
way, and we associate the child's numbers and 
language with things in which he is specifically inter- 
ested. 

Now in respect to morals and religion, the tendency 
to reduce matters to a system is even more strong 
and intolerant than in mathematics or science. The 
religious systems and statements are usually formu- 
lated from the adult point of view, and hence need 
much adjustment to youthful interest. Most of the 
religious teaching and incentives of the past have 
related to the future life. In the very nature of things 
this is not an incentive that bulks large in childhood, 
— and it should not. Finally much of religious think- 
ing has been couched in philosophical form, and 
naturally there has been little in it on which to base 
enthusiasm in the life of the immature. 

These and other things have made the development 
of a reasonable and common-sense pedagogy of religion 
almost impossible. There has apparently been 
something of the thought that the pious attempt to 
impart to children these adult philosophical con- 
ceptions would be supplemented by some supernatural 
overcoming of the bad pedagogy. Such teachers 
should recall the fact that Jesus did not undertake to 



78 Use of Motives 

teach religion to his childUke disciples in this system- 
atic way. 

Topics for Further Study and Discussion 

1. The use of natural motives like curiosity, 
restlessness, the gang spirit, and the sex impulses, for 
religious ends. Is it possible? Is it right? Why? 

2. The seeming handicaps under which we, as 
Sunday-school teachers, work. Examine whether 
they are solely and really handicaps. For example, 
is self-activity encouraged? 

3. The necessity of both emotions and knowledge 
in religious choices. The function of each. 

4. Education of emotions. Necessity of. Methods 
of. 

5. There can be no external temptation except for 
some internal impulse which makes it appealing. 
This is equally true of our upward aspirations, as 
well. No inspiration without appreciation. Can you 
illustrate? 

Suggestive Questions 

Why is it dangerous to try to separate our religious 
life from the normal interests and desires? Give 
instances in which you are aware of conflict between 
desires and judgment. Between desires. What is 
the function of a teacher or parent at such a time? 
What of psychology is suggested by '^ My son, give 
me thine heart '7 How are we to get an alliance 
between desires and judgment? What of our impulses 
and instincts are most liable to be over-developed? 



Motivation in Sunday-School Teaching 79 

Illustrate effects of over-development by concrete 
cases. What is the only way in which habits of right 
choice can be developed? Why are light and music 
and companionship encouraged in saloons? What are 
the satisfactions of sacrifice? How then can we 
encourage sacrifice in proper degree? 

Some Practical Problems 

1. If you were seeking to get and maintain the 
enthusiastic interest and curiosity of a child for 
nature and the study of nature, how would you pro- 
ceed? Would you use your power to force it from the 
outside to work at difficult and uninteresting aspects 
of the subject, where maximum effort was necessary 
for the child? Or would you follow its present trivial, 
and even fickle, interests, where least effort was de- 
manded, and thus gradually lead the child to become 
so interested in what was formerly uninteresting and 
difficult that no conscious effort will be demanded? 

2. If you sought to develop the power and attitude 
of attention in a child, would you insist that it force 
its attention consciously, whether interested or not, 
in order to get mastery over the power of attending? 
Or would you begin with things in which it is already 
interested and thus enable it to acquire the habit 
and attitude of attention to interesting things; and 
develop its interest to take in things more and more 
difficult? Reasons for your answer. 

3. Apply your conclusions to the problem of edu- 
cating tastes, desires, likes, and dislikes. 



80 Use of Motives 

References 

Galloway: Prizes, in Encyclopedia of Sunday 
Schools and Religious Education. Thomas Nelson 
& Sons, N. Y. 

Weigle: The Pupil and the Teacher; Ch. VIII, 
Instinct. Hodder and Stoughton, N. Y. .50 



CHAPTER VI 
A STUDY OF THE NATURAL MOTIVES 

1. Introduction: shortcomings of our present in- 
ducements. 

If it is true, as many educators feel, that the Sunday 
schools get less complete results than they should get 
partly because proper efforts are not made to take 
advantage of the natural desires and interests and 
motives of young people, then it at once becomes the 
duty of the students of Sunday-school problems to 
make some study of this matter of motives. It is the 
feeling of many that the inducements offered in the 
average Sunday school are either (1) too vague and 
broad, or (2) too low and trivial, to be of permanent 
value, or (3) too high and remote from the conscious 
longing of the child to allow him to find in them strong 
incentives to action. 

2. Vague motives; their weakness. 

As illustration of the vague efforts to motivate 
Sunday-school work we might cite the general idea 
that the boys and girls who go to Sunday school are 
in some way ^^ better '' than those who do not, coupled 
with the general exhortation to '^ be good.'' Such 
general points of view have their value, as a kind of 
background, if they are not made too emphatic; and 
they are not to be eliminated from use. They must 

81 



82 Use of Motives 

be reinforced, however, by appeals much more definite 
and concrete. Furthermore it must become true that 
they are actually '' better ^' in practical life. 

Somewhat more definite, but much too broad and 
vague for the use of young children, is the exhortation 
to be like Christ or to guide their lives by his example. 
If the child could do this he wouldn^t need our teach- 
ing. We must rather, after the first attractive, 
inspiring, revealing of the Master, give the pupil 
motives to do particular tasks that are Christlike, and 
suited to his emotional and intellectual stage, even if 
we have to appeal to impulses nearer home. The 
distant objective is good for guidance, but hardly for 
motivation. 

3. Low motives; their weakness. 

Among those devices which are frequently employed 
and are to be looked upon as pedagogically poor, to 
be used only in emergencies, if at all — are such arti- 
ficial stimulants as material prizes, forced and ex- 
aggerated competitions, progressive medals, and other 
similar recognitions. Fear, whether of parental or 
future punishment, falls in the same category. These 
stimuli all produce intensive motives and actions; 
but usually they are so far removed in reality from the 
moral and spiritual results we are after, and their use 
is so generally followed by unwholesome reactions, 
that they do not minister to the sustained growth we 
want to get. 

4. Appeals too lofty or too remote. 

In the third class of appeals, which cannot take 



A Study of the Natural Motives 83 

deep effect because of the immaturity of children, 
we must include the high spiritual states and expecta- 
tions, both in respect to this life and the life to come, 
which may be regarded as normal to the aged or 
mature Christian of the meditative type. The ideas 
thus associated with rest, peace, and heaven do not, 
and ought not to, have a very large place with the 
child. To insist on them in early life is sure to breed 
hypocrisy or revolt in normal children. 

5. Summary of the instinctive elements to which we 
may appeal. 

It will help our study of motivation to make some 
display of the qualities of personality in children to 
which appeal can be made; and of the general results 
of such appeals upon the states of mind and the atti- 
tude of life that go to make up character. It is no 
part of the thought of the present writer that this 
outline of the personal qualities back of the motives 
which may be reached in our effort to influence life, 
is complete or final. The only contention is that all 
the results of modern pedagogy show that it is suicidal 
not to reinforce teaching by every proper appeal to 
the strong, native, effective motives; and that it is 
not good education nor good religion to use inferior 
or ill-adapted motives when it is possible to invoke 
better. 

We may remark again that all motives get their 
strength from the fact that it brings satisfaction to us 
to allow them to express themselves in their normal 
way. This is just as true of the high motives as of the 



84 Use of Motives 

low. It is the actual or prospective satisfaction that 
gives the zest. We may call this selfishness if we wish; 
but it is not wise, in our efforts to improve children 
and adults, including ourselves, to forget that our 
progress consists largely in sacrificing lower satis- 
factions to higher, more refined ones. 

It is said of Jesus himself that he '* endured the 
cross for the joy that was set before him.'' The highest 
point we ever reach is to get pleasure out of self- 
sacrifice. It is to the credit of our natures that we 
may pass from satisfaction of self-indulgence to find 
satisfaction in self-sacrifice. 

In the following table an effort has been made to 
display some of these native impulses, to show in a 
concrete way how parents and teachers may appeal 
to them in securing internal motives for conduct, and 
to indicate some of the results in personality which 
may come from the use and development of them. 
The teacher will be able to extend the list of these 
qualities and their values. They are merely the raw 
material, very differently mixed in different children, 
on which and by means of which we must work in our 
efforts to equip the children in our Sunday schools 
with the disposition, the power, and the habit of 
making right choices. 



A Study of the Natural Motives 



85 



A. Native Quali- 
ties and Instincts to 
which appeal may be 
made. 



B. Method of Ap- 
peal to these Motives 
in order to get sound 
Results. 



C. Results in Per- 
sonality which may 
come from their Use, 
— both good and 
bad. (Dangers from 
wrong or over-em- 
phasis.) 



1. Curiosity. 



2. Desire for 
Ownership. 



3. Desire to Share. 



Start with the 
Child's desire t o 
know, satisfy it with 
real knowledge, con- 
nect this with what 
needs to be imparted 
in such a way as to 
get " contact " and 
enlarged curiosity. 

Usually needs to be 
checked and guided 
rather than urged. 

To be coupled with 
next. 



Make clear to child 
cases of need; induce 
him to share with 
those he is most fond 
of, gradually extend 
the field; be sure 
the child sees the 
happiness it has pro- 
duced. 



Knowledge. 

Thirst for higher 
kinds of knowledge. 

(May become low 
and morbid, if al- 
lowed to dwell on 
Uttle things exclu- 
sively.) 



Material posses- 
sions. Ought to di- 
minish with higher 
development. (May 
degenerate into ava- 
rice, theft, dis- 
honesty.) 

Liberality, benev- 
olence, generosity. 
Habit of unselfish- 
ness. 

(Indiscriminate 
giving.) 



86 



Use of Motives 



4. Imitation. 



5. Contrariness. 



6. Emulation 
Rivalry. 



o r 



7. Restlessness. 



^ 8. Fait h 

Tnisu'ulness. 



and 



Give proper scope! Good or bad ac- 
to it, by furnishing tions, customs, 
suitable, attractive iiabits, attitudes, de- 
examples both of per- 
sonalities and of 
actions. 

Guided and won 
over by superior rea- 
son and patience, 
rather than by su- 
perior force. 

Sparingly used; 
and then stripped 
as nearly as possible 
of the " peisonsd " 

feeling. 



Supply varied, 

suitable, wholesome, 
attractive outlets. 



Constant truth; 
fair treatment. Ap- 
peal in such a way as 
to extend it from 
known persons into a 
love and confidence 
in Universe. 



pending on the hero. 
(Lack of originality.) 

Originality ; 
strength of purpose. 

(Disagreeable ego- 
tism and antago- 
nism.) 



ef. 



Vigor and 
ficiency. 

Intensification of 
action. 

(Offensive egotism 
and envy or jeal- 
ousy.) 

Experimentation 
and activity. 

Discovery and utili- 
zation of expressive 
powers. 

(Nervousness and 
ineffective changes.) 

Constructive e n - 
thusiasm. C o n - 

tinuity of purpose 
and effort. 

Sympathy: opti- 
mism. 

(Credulity; open- 
to imposition.) 



A Study of the Natural Motives 



87 



9. Obedience. 



10. Fear. 



11. Imagination. 



Based originally on 
the inexperience of 
the child, it should be 
appealed to wisely 
and sanely; should 
be reinforced by ab- 
solute justice and 
truth; should not be 
overworked. 



Only to be ap- 
pealed to if at all, in 
extreme emergencies 
and crises; and then 
by perfectly true, 
convincing, unex- 
aggerated statement 
of danger. 

To be used i n a 
broad, n o n -critical 
way, relating it to 
higher rather than 
lower tendencies and 
possibihties o f t h e 
nature. 



Habits and atti- 
tudes of obedience to 
conventions and 
laws. 

Harmonious and 
cooperative relations 
with others. 

Assimilation o f 
what the race has 
gained. 

(Lack of originality 
and independence, 
and of personal 
growth and c o n - 
victions.) 

Intensity of action 
(or paralysis of ac- 
tion), but usually 
through n e g a t ive 
motives, — (usually 
reacting harmfully on 
personality). 



Larger, rounder 
views, sympathies, 
and insights than 
mere matter-of-fact 
statements of truths 
will give or allow. 
(Unreality and lack 
of harmony with 
facts.) 



88 



Use of Motives 



12. Instinctof 
Repetition. 



13. Play Instinct. 



14. Talking In 
stinct. 



15. Instinct for 
" Doing Things." 



Furnish o p p o r 
tunity to repeat the 
good attitudes, 
speeches, acts, deci- 
sions, etc., rather than 
the bad. 

No appeal neces 
sary. Guide and 
make serve construe 
tive ends. Play is the 
moral arena and 
clinic of childhood. 
Use to secure moral 
habits. 



Cultivate as a 
means of exact ex- 
pression, and of the 
development and 
crystallization of in- 
ner ideals and 
ideas. Helps reveal 
to teachers just 
where pupil is. 

Encourage; guide, 
furnish wholesome 
channels. There is 
no way of equal 
value for developing 
personahty, and pre- 
venting demoraliza- 
tion, at critical times. 



Facility in the 
thing repeated; skill, 
habits, — good o r 
bad. 

(Lack of origi- 
nahty.) 

Enthusiastic ac- 
tion; complete en- 
gagement of the 
whole personality, 
and the habit of this; 
practise in control of 
self. (Lack of seri- 
ousness; desire to be 
amused.) 

Facility of self- 
expression. 

(Hypocrisy :a 
means of covering 
real thoughts.) 



Practise; self- 
discovery and self- 
control; skill; habits 
of effective industry. 

(Neglect of the 
ideal, meditative side 
of life.) 



A Study of the Natural Motives 



89 



16. Instinct 
Leading. 



for 



Find special capa- 
bilities, and offer op- 
portunity to exercise 
them in most whole- 
some degree and 
manner. Power i n 
leadership depends 
on practise in lead- 
ing. 



Ability to lead; 
habits of leading. 

(Egoism; rivalry. 
Unwillingness to fol- 
low.) 



Topics for Further Study and Discussion 

1. An examination of the state of your own Sunday 
school to determine what motives are actually ap- 
pealed to in order : 

(1) To secure attendance, 

(2) To secure order, 

(3) To induce worship and reverence, 

(4) To get class work done. 

Estimate at what points improvement could be made. 

2. The motivating power of a satisfaction is in 
proportion to its nearness. Corollaries of this. 

3. The possibility of an upward development and 
refinement of satisfactions, — from selfish gratifica- 
tions to sacrifice for others. 

4. The rewards (satisfactions) which we use in 
motivating pupils should be just as natural to the 
total situation as possible. 

Suggestive Questions 

Is a child better off at Sunday school than at home? 
Examine both sides of the question. Suppose the 



90 Use of Motives 

Sunday school is not orderly; suppose its teaching is 
superficial and unconvincing; suppose its worship is 
flippant and irreverent; suppose it ignores the real 
present capacities of the child emotionally, intellec- 
tually, and in its impulses and powers of expression? 
Did you ever know a Sunday school in which some of 
these shortcomings existed? What is involved in 
the idea of ^' appropriate '^ motives? 



Some Practical Problems 

1. Some motives used in our Sunday schools: 

(1) Fear, cupidity, rivalry: too low, but 

strong. 

(2) Heaven, spiritual life, etc.: fine, but too 

lofty and remote. 
What is there between? And how can we use all 
of these things in order to get the best results in 
practise? 

2. Make a table continuing the one of section 5 
using the following youthful instincts and impulses: 
the ^' gang '^ instinct with its appeal to loyalty; the 
collecting impulse; the destructive tendencies; 
the fighting instinct; the sex impulses. 

References 

Abbott: Gentle Measures in Management and Train- 
ing of the Young. Harper Bros., N. Y. $1.25 



A Study of the Natural Motives 91 

Bagley: Educative Values. The Macmillan Co., 

N. Y. $1.25 
Galloway: Biology of Sex for Parents and Teachers. 

(Chapter VII.) D. C. Heath. .75 
Weigle: The Pupil and the Teacher. Lutheran 

PubHcation Society, Philadelphia. .50 



CHAPTER VII 

MOTIVATION IN THE INSTRUCTIONAL SIDE 
OF SUNDAY-SCHOOL WORK 

1. The two aspects of education: instruction and 
expression. 

In earlier chapters it has been suggested that there 
are two ways by which we may influence the growth 
and development of the character of the pupils. In 
the first place we may give information or instruct, 
inspire, impress or stimulate the individual. This is 
what we usually mean by teaching. This is the im- 
pressive side of education. It is the method whereby 
we influence the individual by what has happened in 
the past. We are stimulating personality from the 
receiving side. This is very important; and we need 
to learn continually how to do this better and better. 
This, however, is not all. We may, in the second place, 
educate by securing or allowing activity on the part 
of the pupil. He may develop character by doing 
things and by taking the satisfaction or discomfort 
that comes from the doing. This is learning by 
expression. There are many who insist that this is 
the best possible way to learn, — that one learns 
much more surely by practise than by instruction. 

In reality, as we have seen, genuine teaching 

93 



94 Use of Motives 

properly includes both. The best results come from 
right instruction, given in the most appealing possible 
way, meeting the internal needs and impulses of the 
pupil, going on into right choices and action, and 
followed by the full satisfaction that comes from 
doing the right thing. This is a complete personal 
reaction, — the most educative thing in the world. 

An illustration from the early hfe of the child may 
make this clearer. In learning to talk the child hears 
words of others. These make a distinct impression. 
The sound may come to carry definite meaning to 
the child. On the other hand the child has the 
power of making noises, and does so. Possibly these 
may have some meaning to the child. These two 
things, however, do not constitute talking; they must 
become related before much of education can follow. 
In really learning to talk, the child must hear and be 
impressed with the sounds, and must then imitate 
them by its own muscular actions. It is the coupling 
up of expression to impression that proves so full of 
educational value. 

2. The pupiVs part in impression : attention. 

A large part of education must always be made 
up of instruction, of impression. Life is too short for 
each individual to be taught solely by his own actions 
and experiences. Indeed education as a human 
enterprise consists essentially in enabling the youth 
to get some of the experience of the race without 
having to go through it all himself. It is a short cut 
and, while it saves time, it has the shortcomings that 



Motivation in Instruction 05 

belong to all short cuts. It is never quite as vital as 
that which one gets by practise. 

It is very clear that openness and receptiveness on 
the part of the pupil is a most important quality in 
determining the results of instruction. His attitude 
must be one of attention, of receptiveness, of apprecia- 
tion in order that instruction shall really reach the 
springs of personality. This is the reason that edu- 
cators put so much emphasis on attention. The 
power and willingness to give attention is not only 
necessary to get a particular piece of information; 
it is the very foundation of all character. Attention 
is to personality what cement is to artificial granite. 
Without it there would be no coherence in either case. 
No real impression can be made on pupils without 
this attitude of openness or attention. 

3. Motivation of attention. 

Without attention and openness a teacher can do 
nothing. All instruction must be such, and of such 
method, as first of all to win the attention of the pupil. 
This openness, to be most effective, must be from 
within. Openness that is forced from without is not 
likely to have any permanence or much usefulness. 
The pupil himself then must have internal motives 
for giving attention, — for opening up. If he has 
this, the attention becomes involuntary. More 
results can be had when attention comes thus spon- 
taneously, and the energy of the pupil does not need 
to be given to the mere act of attending. All of this 
means that what we teach should appeal strongly to 



96 Use of Motives 

some of the interests already within the child. We 
must arouse his curiosity and desire for knowledge, 
or connect closely what we are presenting with some- 
thing that he already knows and enjoys, or that 
appeals strongly to his imagination or tastes; or we 
must furnish him a sense of pleasure in anticipation 
of something we have for him. There must be reasons 
for giving attention that are convincing to the inner 
nature of the child and at the same time are as natural 
and related to the thing to be taught as is possible. 
There are those who would insist that a part of the 
task of education is to teach the child to give his 
attention, by voluntar>^ act, whether he thinks it 
worth his while or not. It is sufl&cient to observe that 
attention as an end in itself is worthless. It is a 
great means. It is much better so to motivate un- 
interesting or disagreeable problems by way of some 
form of self-interest and satisfaction that this will 
insure the necessar}^ spontaneous attention. 

4. Peculiar value of receptiveriess in moral and 
religious education. 

If it is true that the child must really be open and 
receptive in order to get the practical, common-place 
knowledges of ever}'-day life, it is doubly true in 
respect to the higher moral and rehgious instruction 
and inspirations. Instruction here must go deeper 
than mere knowledge. It must reach through into 
purposes, choices, and action. For this reason it is 
necessary that all the emotional states, impulses, 
desires, appetites, and the like shall be enlisted. It 



Motivation in Instruction 97 

must be more than mere theory. Otherwise knowl- 
edge of moral and religious things would be divorced 
from conduct, — and this is fatal to both morals and 
religion. This openness to truth, this receptiveness 
of the essential things that make for right purposes 
and choices, this attitude of confidence in and sym- 
pathy with all the incoming stimuli, is essentially 
what religious teachers have always meant by faith; 
It is lack of this which prevents the individual profit- 
ing as he might by the experiences and influence of 
others. The normal child has this capacity in a 
marked degree. It is criminal not to find the right 
way to bring it into play and utilize it fully. 

5. The religious effect of partial reception of truth. 
The reception of truth, to have moral value, must 
be complete and convincing to the personality. It 
must be sufficient not merely to win a vague and 
momentary assent but to dominate the purposes 
and the will continuously. In order to get such com- 
plete reception for our truths we must win both the 
intellectual and the emotional avenues to choice. 
Partial reception, — either with the desires respected 
and the judgment unsatisfied, or the reason convinced 
and the impulses and desires unmet, — necessarily 
means internal conflict and personal inefficiency. 
Such an internal conflict is sure to involve an uncer- 
tainty of purpose and a vacillation of choices which is 
far from that sure, definite, complete carrying of 
stimulus through into conduct that we have been 
seeking. This situation encourages to a profession of 



98 Use of Motives 

beliefs which are not allowed to influence conduct. 
It is not true merely that ^' faith without works is 
dead ^'; beliefs and emotions that do not find a free 
flow through choices into actions are deadening to 
all moral quaUties. This is death. 

6. The effect of proper motivation upon the degree 
and quality of reception. 

If impression is to have that thoroughness and 
completeness which will make it possible for it to 
issue in right conduct there must be the fewest barriers 
within. Not merely so; we must seek the active 
alliance of the child through active preliminary 
appeal to, and use of, the great moving impulses 
already having a place in its life. This is having a 
friend within the fortress. This helps insure the 
spontaneous openness and attention referred to above. 
Half the battle is won if we can utilize some strong 
natural desire that tends in the direction that we 
wish the character to grow. If there are such in- 
stincts and impulses, and our appeals properly respect 
them, the reception of the truth we present will not 
be partial, but total; not indifferent or reluctant, but 
with enthusiasm; not with internal combat between 
impulses and judgment, but with wholeness of per- 
sonality. Furthermore such completeness of reception 
more nearly promises issue in conduct, which is after 
all the test of the impression. 

We have called this work of the teacher in giving 
the child legitimate satisfaction in its learning proc- 
esses through appeal to its natural instincts and 



Motivation in Instruction 99 

impulses, motivation. It has been shown to give 
valuable results in secular learning. It heightens 
every element of its effectiveness. It is believed that 
this principle has even more value in the instruction 
side of moral and religious education than in general 
education, — if there is any difference between them. 
This is true because of the fact stated above that 
information whose purpose is the molding of choice 
and conduct must necessarily be more convincing to 
personaUty than that whose end is knowledge and 
culture. The real self is more completely enlisted 
and measured by choice and conduct than by accep- 
tance of truth. Hence calls to conduct, if they are to 
be successful, must be more completely in accordance 
with the inner springs of our life than is necessary in 
any other form of teaching. 

7. Sunday-school loork has been chiefly instructional; 
but even this has not been well motivated. 

Our Sunday-school work has been for a long time 
directed to impression and instruction. We have 
taught our classes. We have tried to instruct them in 
the Bible and in catechism. We have given them 
^^ line upon line and precept upon precept.'' We have 
sought to make permanent impressions upon them. 
How poorly we have succeeded is suggested by the 
fact that our children know so much more of the 
Greek myths taught in the schools than of the Hebrew 
stories taught in our Sunday schools. There are 
probably several reasons for this. Much of our 
religious instruction has been untimely, has been 



100 Use of Motives 

unsuited to the state of development of the child, 
and hence has failed to utilize the natural tendencies 
and interests of the child which would reinforce and 
make the teaching vital. It is not intended to create 
the impression that the work the Sunday school is 
doing by way of instruction is not valuable. It is. 
Indeed it is the best that is being done by society at 
present for moral and religious education of youth. 
Yet its effectiveness can be greatly increased by 
finding and utilizing the motives which will more 
fully ally the child with the work. 

8. Natural discrepancy between child motives and 
adult motives. 

If an enthusiastic, zest-inspiring motive is needed 
to secure better work and more lasting results mentally 
and religiously, we must reahze at once that the child 
cannot have the internal interests and motives that 
would properly influence the mature mind. His 
experiences, his outlook, his natural desires and 
expressions are not attuned to the moral and religious 
standards and purposes and hopes which may natu- 
rally and properly move the mature person who is 
his teacher. He cannot appreciate yet what will 
appeal to him greatly later. Consequently he will 
not open his life to just the stimuli which an adult 
would choose. There is nothing wrong with him if 
his attention is not readily given to what we find 
most interesting. Because of this older people are 
likely to deny the rightness of these youthful states; 
but we have very good authority for believing that 



Motivation in Instruction 101 

these fundamental qualities of childhood are close 
to the Divine order of things. On account of this it 
frequently happens that very young and immature 
teachers, in spite of poor equipment otherwise, can 
secure much greater interest and better results than 
older teachers do. They are closer to the child's real 
impulses. 

Motivation is the natural complement of grading 
the instruction to the child's intelligence. It is 
grading the purposes and the whole approach to meet 
the development of his instincts and emotions. Both 
are essential in any religious education. Now that 
we are beginning to get rationally graded Sunday- 
school instruction, our next step is proper grading of 
our appeals to the progressing motives of youth. 

9. Our specific task. 

If these things are true and if the naturalness and 
intensity of the motive enhance the educational 
results, the great problem of the Sunday-school teacher 
is to find a way to make the pupil want to do that for 
which the Sunday school stands. How poor we are 
in this respect can be gathered by any thoughtful 
person who has had experience with the average type 
of Sunday school. What have we done deliberately 
to make the Sunday school a place where a healthy 
boy really wants to go and work? The fact that this 
is not his state of mind with respect to the Sunday 
school is more the fault of the school than of the boy. 
What motives in the personality of the boy do we 
depend on to secure attendance at the class, to induce 



102 Use of Motives 

him to do his work on the lessons, to secure real, 
cordial liking for the Sunday school, and any en- 
thusiastic doing of the things taught in his class? 
Are any of these motives natural, internal, spon- 
taneous, zestful likings of the boy which lead him into 
right attitudes and living; or are they chiefly some- 
thing forced on him from without, or so artificial 
that they are only such stimulants as a whip to a 
jaded horse? 

10. Some impulses that may furnish motives for 
learning. 

We shall see in the next chapter that most of our 
motives look toward expression rather than learning, 
and that one of the most effective ways to motivate 
instruction is to do so indirectly through the instincts 
that lead to action, thus allowing instruction to 
become incidental to the problems aroused by action. 
For example, it often happens that the need of 
arithmetic in order to do something like building a 
boat will make a boy much more open to instruction. 
There are, however, a few powerful instincts directly 
serving instruction. 

(l) Curiosity. This is a universal impulse, — this 
desire to know, — and is at the foundation of all 
getting of knowledge. It is shown in the young child 
by the perpetual asking of questions. It leads directly 
to knowledge. It may be handled in such a way as 
to impart knowledge and yet be left unsatisfied. 
This indeed is our task. Starting simply with the 
child^s desire to know, — it makes very little differ- 



Motivation in Instruction 103 

ence what, — a teacher of insight will impart real 
knowledge about it and so connect it with what the 
child needs to know as to get complete ^' contact '' 
and an enlarged curiosity. Curiosity is merely the 
beginning name for the scientific and philosophic 
spirit of later years. Curiosity sets the problems 
which motivate learning. 

How poorly we, as parents and teachers, use this 
impulse is shown by the fact that our children have 
lost most of their interest in nature by the time they 
reach the high school. This is not because they have 
learned all that might interest them. The child 
starts out with the utmost appetite for the things of 
nature. We, in the course of his growth, kill this 
interest by our unpedagogical method of meeting 
his curiosity. We should keep it alive and increase 
it. Instead we deaden it or direct it toward less 
worthy objects. 

In our Sunday schools we do not make the use of 
this natural quality of children with the insight and 
perseverance we should have. There are few satis- 
factions so keen to the human mind as this thrill of 
learning something we wish to know. In Sunday 
schools, as elsewhere, we must get the child to feel 
that there is something ahead that he wants to learn. 
We must then redeem our promise. The Bible is 
fuller of such things than any history we know. The 
lives of righteous people are as full of such things as 
those of the wrong-doers. The problem^s of life are 
rich with revelations for which the child mind can 



104 Use of Motives 

be made eager. To be sure it requires good teaching 
to use these materials in this way. It requires what 
we call in school the '^ problem raising '' attitude. 
When we get a pupil to the place where he is con- 
tinually raising problems, and where he is sure he 
can come to us and be put on the road to an answer 
in such a way as will leave him still more anxious to 
know something else, we are sure of his interest and 
his progress. This is our biggest and most natural 
way to motivate instruction. 

(2) Trustfulness and confidence. This is a marked 
quality of early childhood, and may be made by any 
teacher or parent of discretion a great ally to instruc- 
tion, and an inspiration to learning. It helps to get 
attention and to insure the open gateway into the 
child's personality for whatever the trusted teacher 
says. Young children are disposed to accept truth on 
the authority of their elders. This tendency must be 
used wisely and discreetly. It should be strengthened 
and rewarded by absolute justice and truth on the 
part of the parent and teacher. It should be used to 
get many vital ideas accepted by the child, before he 
can learn them by experience. It should not be abused 
by making appear to be true and vital things which 
the child may later learn are mere speculations, 
neither should it be so used as to displace the tendency 
to get truth for oneself. The place of such authority 
in teaching ought to decrease as the child's own 
powers of investigation increase. 

(3) Imagination, We have talked a good deal of 



Motivation in Instruction 105 

imagination in childhood and the part it plays in the 
child^s own mental activities. We have also thought 
of it as a means of interpreting the love for stories 
and the like, which is a characteristic of childhood. 
But it has a function much more to our purpose than 
these. It is one of the great means of opening this 
gateway into the life. The child is not merely imagi- 
native inside, so to speak. It sees and hears and feels 
and tastes imaginatively. It gets more than is actually 
told to it. The whole appreciative and receptive side 
is tinged with it and heightened in efficiency by it. 
This merely means that our appeals to the child 
should respect the imagination and should not become 
too matter-of-fact. The imagination will often hold 
in solution and precipitate more truth inside than 
pure understanding will. 

(4) Advancing the self in the estimation of others. 
This is a quite legitimate motive, provided too much 
use is not made of it. It may be used early in life. 
It is often seen to work in classes where the teacher 
has secured a strong hold on the affections and 
imagination of the pupils. It should not stop with 
the desire to win the approval of the teacher. It 
should extend to the other members of the class, to 
the parents, and to all who are interested. Aside 
from its immediate value in motivating the receiving 
of instruction, when properly developed it helps lead 
to an appreciation of public opinion, which is a big 
part of all education in social morals. 

(5) Promoting self-advancement Later in the child's 



106 Use of Motives 

life there are some other motives that may open the 
way to instruction and learning. A feeling of interest 
in one^s own growth and advancement will often make 
a youth keen for teaching. For example, the purpose 
of fitting the life for a particular career acts in this 
way. The pleasure in mastering and conquering may 
often be appealed to as a motive for learning as well 
as for doing. A sense of need of information in general 
or in particular, no matter how it originates, has great 
value here. In all these kinds of appeals it is the 
privilege of the teacher to help secure the feeling and 
then supply the satisfaction. 

(6) Artificial motivation. In what has been said 
there has been an effort to keep the motives just as 
close as possible to the nature of the work, — namely, 
to open the life of the child from within to receive 
instruction. The closer the motive is to the thing 
desired the more the personality really assimilates the 
income. We often use in our Sunday schools a series 
of artificial stimuli which are of questionable value. 
Such are competitions, prizes, medals, emblems, 
picnics, Christmas trees, and possibly punishments. 
These appeal to greed, rivalry, fear and other forms 
of selfishness which furnish powerful motives, but 
they lead us directly away from the moral and religious 
states of mind which we desire to have become 
habitual. These might be justified if we were seeking 
information alone, but we are seeking right character 
by way of information. It is important to remember 
that we do two things in appeaUng to human impulses 



Motivation in Instruction 107 

as we have been suggesting: (a) we get a response by- 
way of this motive, and (6) we cultivate the motive. 
We cannot afford to exalt unduly a permanent motive 
like greed, in order to secure a temporary right 
response. The response cannot be more than tempo- 
rary with an artificial or unrelated motive. The 
form of the response cannot fail to be permanent if 
we fix permanently in character a natural motive for 
it. 

What we do now in a superficial, haphazard and 
artificial way we want to do naturally, thoroughly, 
and after a complete study of all the possibilities, 
with a full understanding of its importance and 
meaning. 

Topics for Further Study and Discussion 

1. Strong and weak points of learning by instruc- 
tion? By experience? 

2. Attention as a necessary factor in learning. As 
a foundational element in character. 

3. Relation between the following ideas : Attention, 
appreciation, receptivity, faith. Are these ends in 
themselves? What is the real end? 

4. Redefine motivation in terms of the receiving 
side of personality. 

5. Analyze the motives to which you have been 
trying to appeal as a Sunday-school teacher. 

6. Imagination as an aid to reception. 



108 Use of Motives 

Suggestive Questions 

How would you illustrate that attention is necessary 
to learning? Why is it necessary? In what various 
ways may the attention of the child be secured? What 
do you think is the best of these? Why is *' faith 
without works dead '7 Give illustrations of conflict 
between desires and judgment. How does such a 
state affect decision? What is the proper work of 
parent and teacher at such a time? Give illustrations 
of desires and judgment coinciding. Effect. Give 
reasons why natural incentives are better than 
artificial ones. What do you mean by natural? 

Some Practical Problems 

1. Should the teacher try to look at the thing 
taught from the standpoint of the pupil, or try to 
get the pupil to see it from the mature standpoint? 
Select concrete instances and show the practical 
bearing of your answer on the manner of teaching. 

2. Can you suggest any practical means by which 
the teacher may be enabled to '^ be converted and 
become as a little child '' ? 

3. The problem of answering children's questions 
to best advantage. What do we want to get? Should 
we refuse to answer? Why? Should we evade? 
Why? Should we answer with complete finality? 
Why? What then? 

4. Draw up a sound scheme to motivate: (1) 
attendance at Sunday school; (2) study of the 



Motivation in Instruction 109 

assigned work; (3) carrying the teachings into 
practise. Is your scheme better than the prizes, 
competitions, and rivalries, usually employed? 



References 

Athearn: The Church School. The Pilgrim Press, 
Boston. $1.00 

Galloway: The Appeal to Motives in Religious Edu- 
cation, in Encyclopedia of Sunday Schools and 
Religious Education. Thomas Nelson & Sons, 
N. Y. 



CHAPTER VIII 

MOTIVATING THE EXPRESSIVE SIDE OF 
SUNDAY SCHOOL WORK 

1. Summary, 

We have seen that all instruction is much more 
effective if the pupil really desires to know the thing 
we are trying to teach, and that he is much more open 
and receptive if he has motives of his own for wanting 
to know. We have seen that it is even more important 
in moral and religious teaching than in any other to 
have the complete enthusiasm of the pupil. The 
Sunday school has yet very much to learn in bringing 
the natural internal impulses to the aid of the instruc- 
tion. We must find ways to make our moral and 
religious instruction appeal to all the natural instincts 
that make the child willing and anxious to receive 
information. The appeals of the street are very 
closely adjusted to the child^s desires. Ours must 
be made equally so. 

2. The greater meaning of expression in education. 
Instruction is a great source of ideas, but action or 

expression is even more important in some respects. 

We learn by doing. Even the truths that we receive 

by impression become more really ours when we put 

them into practise. Information merely gives ideas. 

Ill 



112 Use of Motives 

Conduct or expression both gives and fixes ideas, 
develops skill, and forms habits. There is a real 
possession through expression that mere impression 
never gives. It is more blessed to give than to receive. 
It is more blessed to do than to be told. This is even 
more true in moral and religious matters than in 
ordinary education, as we have seen. There can be 
no great moral or religious value in any mental states 
that do not find some way of expressing themselves. 
Indeed moral and religious knowledges and states are 
not really our own until they have been used, — put 
into practise. 

Sunday schools have not done as well as they might 
even in teaching; they are still less efficient in getting 
expression of what they teach. We really have no 
adequate way to insure that our pupil will put his 
best impressions into use. This is a fatal weakness. 
One of the most urgent tasks of the Sunday school 
is to find ways to help the pupil express his good teach- 
ings and good resolutions. 

3. Education of choice is the heart of moral and 
religious education. 

It has been held throughout this discussion that 
the real character of the individual is expressed in 
choice or decision. This is the point at which the in- 
dividual, in the light of all his instincts, his desires, his 
experiences, his ideas, his habits, and his ideals, decides 
his course. If this is wrong his whole personality has 
failed. This is the supreme point where moral value 
attaches. If we can insure right choice we are sue- 



Motivating Expression 113 

ceeding in our education. Impression and instruction 
have a large part in determining choice, but conduct 
and action are the only real tests of it. We can only 
educate choice by choosing, and expression is merely 
carrying choice into effect. Expression is therefore 
closer to choice and educates it more directly than 
impression alone does. Of course the normal way and 
the best way to educate choice is by impression or 
instruction or stimulus going on through choice and 
will, into expression. It is by coupling impression 
and expression that we really educate personality. 
This, as we have seen, is the complete and normal 
personal reaction. 

4. More important to motivate expression than im- 
pression. 

In proportion as the expressive side of life is im- 
portant in the development of life, is it necessary to 
find adequate and right motives to determine expres- 
sion. Because action is a better measure of character 
than learning is, and is at the same time more edu- 
cative of character, it becomes very important that the 
motives called on to secure conduct shall be sound. A 
person may be taught a lie and not become a liar; 
one cannot choose and practise a lie without becoming 
untrue. Appeal to false and artificial motives for 
learning may be merely futile and unfortunate; 
using false motives in securing conduct is to vitiate 
the very machinery of choice. There is more self- 
activity in expression than in impression. In just the 
same degree is right motivation more profitable and 



114 Use of Motives 

essential in respect to conduct. The motives must be 
one's own in order that choice shall have any value. 

5. Superior motivation possible in expression. 

The natural curiosity of the child furnishes our 
most effective way to arouse enthusiasm for the proc- 
ess of learning, or receiving impressions. We must 
make the utmost use of it in all good teaching. There 
are some other natural motives that look toward the 
reception of knowledge; but there are not very 
many. On the other hand, there are a number of 
strong native impulses that push toward behavior. 
There are more strong instincts leading to expression 
than toward reception. This is only another way of 
saying that the really important adjustments of life 
are made by our behavior rather than by knowledge 
alone; or in other words impression or learning that 
does not pass over into choices and conduct has no 
practical value in life. The fitness of a life is deter- 
mined more by what comes out than by what goes in. 
Ideas, knowledge, desires, habits are valuable in 
practical life only as they make choices and responses 
more sound and righteous. To insure that we shall 
express ourselves both vigorously and rightly, many 
of our most powerful impulses and most valued satis- 
factions cluster about doing things. Most people in 
full health get more pleasure out of expression than 
our of mere impression and states of mind. Indeed 
the word emotion^ which we have come to think of 
rather as a state of mind, is in reality a term demand- 
ing action, — expression. The reader will recall that 



Motivating Expression 115 

what we have called motivation just means the using 
of the natural impulses to get enthusiasm for our 
educational processes. If such powerful motives are 
back of our expression, and if expression really gives 
us indirectly more accurate knowledge than in- 
struction alone and, in addition, gives skill and 
habits, then we surely must try to find how best to 
motivate it. It is more easy to motivate action than 
to motivate learning. And yet in our Sunday schools 
we have almost ignored this aspect of our oppor- 
tunities. We instruct, but we do not do very much 
to reinforce the instruction by using and gratifying 
the impulses to do. We neglect our most favorable 
means of motivating right choices in a field in which 
motivation is most important and effective in molding 
life, — the field of expression. 

6. Essential to find the right motives in educating by 
expression. 

The greater appeal of the impulses to action and 
their profound effect on the whole machinery of 
choice make it even more essential that we get the 
right motives in expressive work than in impressive 
work. It is not enough merely to get response. We 
must get it in the right way. In other words we must 
pick and develop and appeal to those expressive 
instincts and impulses that are suited to the stage 
of development of the child; those which will produce 
the most normal and appropriate expression for the 
pupil. Grading of expression then is even more 
important than grading of information. There is 



116 Use of Motives 

nothing more demoralizing to character than to suc- 
ceed in inspiring modes of personal expression that 
are false to the real nature of the child. The thoughts 
of a person of fifty are not as much out of place in a 
child as the expression and conduct would be. Hypoc- 
risy is the certain outcome of trying to get expression 
through motives which should not normally control 
the child. 

7. Some of the natural impulses which may serve as 
motives for expression. 

Roughly there are two broad classes of expressive 
activities that give satisfaction to us and thus serve 
to induce us to act. One class is clearly personal and 
selfish; the other looks rather toward social service, 
the service of others. Both sets of motives play a 
large part in impelling us to action. By means of 
them we may educate our children. Among the more 
personal and selfish expressive instincts are those of 
getting possessions, of rivalry, of making things, of 
fighting, and of mastering difficulties. Among those 
which look somewhat more toward others are the 
impulses of leading, sharing, entertaining, and obey- 
ing. Somewhat mixed are play, imitation, etc. These 
impulses are very unequal in their strength; but the 
point which it is desired to make is this: These are 
real, natural impulses of youth; they urge the child 
to action of one kind or another. We too want the 
child to act and do things, because by doing things he 
learns and grows. By coupling what we desire him 
to do with some appropriate one of these natural 



Motivating Expression 117 

yearnings we can more certainly get the child to do 
what we think is best for it, and because the result 
accords with these internal impulses the child will get 
more growth out of the doing. It is not possible to 
discuss each of these. A few examples must serve: 

(l) The play instinct. We are coming to recognize 
that this is one of the most powerful of the childish 
instincts and one of the most educative. Already 
we have learned that we can get the average child to 
do enthusiastically a great deal that we desire it to 
do by making a '^ game '' of it. The movement for 
supervised play is merely an effort to use this most 
educative form of expression in building habits of 
fairness, consideration, honesty, truthfulness, and 
cooperation in the child. The child that can, in his 
games, carry out the teachings that he has received 
about these things is getting the kind of practise he 
needs in order to be an honest business man and a 
moral citizen. Play is sure to have a still larger place 
than it now has as a means of giving expression to 
moral and religious teaching. This is a large part of 
the meaning of the physical work in the Y. M. C. A. 
It is much more than a way to secure healthy bodies. 
It is to motivate right choices by means of sports and 
the play instinct. 

Because of what has been said about the permanent 
educative value of play it is essential that the early 
games shall insure honesty, consideration, fairness, 
self-control and the like just as much as enthusiasm, 
self-activity and pleasure. Indeed all these must be 



118 Use of Motives 

bound up into the child's conception of play, so as to 
become a habit. It is for this reason that early play 
in the home and on the street, and about the school 
should be supervised and guided both in its methods 
and purposes by parents and teachers who under- 
stand its value. 

(2) The instinct of imitation. This is a quite power- 
ful impulse in young children. It may be conscious 
or unconscious, but it surely determines much of the 
conduct of young people. It is clear that this spirit 
may be made a great ally for securing right conduct. 
Reinforced by the instinct of repetition which is also 
characteristic of children, right habits may be formed 
with very little formal impression or teaching. 

Clearly then the parent and teacher should do 
nothing in the presence of the child which he would 
not be willing to have the child reproduce. We 
cannot have wrong impressions striking his senses and 
hope to keep his inner springs of action pure. 

(3) The desire for ownership. This impulse secures 
much of the activity of mankind. It is operative in 
children. It can be used to motivate industry, 
frugality, and other habits that are valuable. The 
fact that it may lead to stealing on the one hand or 
to miserliness on the other is no argument against 
legitimate appeals to it. Many parents would find 
what is drudgery to their children wonderfully trans- 
formed if the children were assured a share of the 
returns from what they do. 

While this motive is useful and worthy there is no 



Motivating Expression 119 

question that the artificial emphasis placed on it by 
modern society makes it dangerous. There is scarcely 
an impulse more abused in our modern civilization. 
Its use in childhood should be accompanied by the 
sanest sort of emphasis upon social sharing and 
service that develop right attitudes in the use of 
possessions. 

(4) The impulse to be ^^ doing things ^^ or making 
something. This is somewhat indefinite, and yet 
every parent will recognize that it is real for strong, 
healthy children. It leads of course, straight to 
behavior, or, as we are too prone to feel, to mis- 
behavior. We may presume on the fact that the 
average child is happier at some activity. Motiva- 
tion of this merely means to couple what we think the 
child should do with this impulse and skilfully to pilot 
the child into the doing, seeing that an adequate 
satisfaction comes because of it. We may class what 
the child does as play, work, and drudgery. Play is 
motivated by large natural impulses; drudgery is 
work that is not properly motivated. As soon as 
anything has sufficient rewards ahead of it to dominate 
the interests it ceases to be drudgery. Drudgery is 
not educative. Any work may be so motivated as 
to make it educative. 

(5) The impulse to be ^' it/^ — the instinct of leader- 
ship. This is a splendid means of giving motive to 
expression. Most of the qualities about which we 
teach our pupils may be developed in connection with 
this. Most pupils have ability to lead in something. 



120 Use of Motives 

If we can devise ways in which the pupil may express 
this instinct we can couple with it the attitudes which 
right leaders and followers must possess. The prac- 
tise of leadership is the only way to develop leaders 
and to give them good and successful qualities. 

(6) The impulse of fighting. Possibly most of us 
regard this as an evil and archaic tendency. We must 
recognize, however, that it has had a rather important 
place in human development. We are often puzzled 
to know how to control it. Perhaps it seems wholly 
impossible to think of using this spirit directly to 
furnish motive and momentum to something worth 
while. Nevertheless it is quite possible. Usually 
fighting in children comes as the primal response to 
something unfair, aggravating, overbearing, and the 
like. However, it expresses itself in the concrete 
against persons. It is quite possible to idealize and 
abstract this and turn the fighting spirit against the 
unfairness, wrong, or other difficulties that threaten 
destruction of personality instead of against per- 
sonality itself. Our object in trying to use these 
natural impulses to motivate conduct is both to 
strengthen conduct and to redirect the primal im- 
pulses. 

(7) The impulse to share. This impulse is just as 
native and primal and satisfaction-giving as fighting 
or gaining possessions. It leads, through sympathy 
and understanding, toward social service. Much 
more enthusiasm can be aroused in a class of boys for 
some suitable form of social service than for any 



Motivating Expression 121 

amount of instruction or information, and much 
more work can be had by way of it. It is needless 
to say that the satisfaction that comes from actually 
doing something for other people is much more keen 
than can come from being taught the duty of helping 
others. This satisfaction is the thing that determines 
the desire to have the experience repeated. It is the 
really impelling thing. 

Topics for Further Study and Discussion 

1. Why is it that doing things has more fixing power 
in education than learning things? Make a careful 
study of the factors on which it depends. 

2. Activity is more satisfying than impressions. 
Why? Corollaries of? 

3. What connections with other social agencies 
must the Sunday schools make if they really aspire 
to help guide the expressive activities of their boys 
and girls? Why? Do you see any way to accomplish 
this? 

4. The grading of expressive work. Why desirable? 

5. The movement for supervised play? Is it 
sound? Why? 

Suggestive Questions 

Why is false conduct a more vital matter than false 
teachings and impressions? If belief and knowledge 
are not allowed to influence conduct, do they have any 
value? Why is it more easy to motivate expression 
than learning? What is the result of encouraging 



122 Use of Motives 

expressions which are not normal to the state of 
development of the child? Why is it desirable to 
change back and forth from one to another form of 
expression? Is it possible to overemphasize and 
overindulge the play and amusement impulse? 
What can we do to avoid the danger? 

Some Practical Problems 

1. Suppose the teacher desires to help the child 
become more obedient in the home, thoughtful of 
the mother, or cheerful, how can the Sunday school 
assist in practise? 

(1) The parent should know what the teacher has 
in mind and be brought to sympathize with it. 

(2) In impressing the child the teacher must make 
his statement of the values and satisfactions in obedi- 
ence and thoughtfulness as concrete and appealing 
as possible. The child must be convinced through 
the warmest, most impelling motives. (What?) 

(3) The teacher should not stop short of a firm 
resolution in the child's mind to make a real trial 
during a limited time. 

(4) The parent should see that the effort of the 
child is recognized, is made easy, and gets the full 
reward in the form of increased appreciation and 
satisfaction. 

(5) Some sort of a report should be made by the 
child to the teacher, and conference held on the results. 

(6) Renewed resolution by the child, and continued 
support by parents and teachers. 



Motivating Expression 123 

2. Intermittent emphasis. It is not best to keep 
preaching on one form of expression until the child 
is weary of it. Get your response; and then pass to 
something else. Later return and build to a still 
higher level. Let the child understand that the whole 
thing is progressive; and teach it to demand and 
watch for and recognize growth in its own qualities. 

3. Cigaret smoking. What are the impulses that 
press the boy to this and similar things? Analyze 
carefully. To what impulses and motives is it possible 
to appeal to meet and overcome these? Which of 
them are most valuable and reliable? Why? 

4. The discovery to parents of their obligations and 
opportunities to study and use the expressive impulses 
suggested in Section 7 of this chapter. 

5. How can we Sunda^^-school teachers assist in 
securing an increase in respect for authority and law 
and the rights of others on the part of children? 



References 

Athearn: The Church School. The Pilgrim Press, 
Boston. $L00 

McMurry: Use of Biography in Religious Instruc- 
tion. Chapter VIII in Principles of Religious 
Education. Longman's, Green, and Co., N. Y. 
$1.25 



CHAPTER IX 

CERTAIN PRINCIPLES TO GUIDE THE 
TEACHER IN HIS APPEAL TO MOTIVES 

1. Review of the natural motives. 

In our partial analysis of personality and of the 
various types of motives that are strong in youth and 
should be respected and used by the religious educator, 
we have found three series which may be considered 
separately, although they are so completely inter- 
twined that they cannot possibly be separated in our 
use of them. 

There is, in the first place, the powerful series of 
native impulses that appear early in life and furnish 
a very large part of the internal stimulus to conduct. 
Among these are curiosity, tendency to imitate, desire 
for possession, rivalry, and restlessness. In the main 
these are quite strong enough by nature, and need 
only to be recognized, respected, utilized, and directed. 
On the whole they should tend to diminish and take 
a subordinate place as age develops and refines the 
personality. 

In a second group are some capacities and ten- 
dencies, such as those of confiding, loving, obeying, 
fearing, hating, and imagining. They are very much 
subject to education by external influences, — more 

125 



126 Use of Motives 

so even than the impulses mentioned above, — and 
they color character quite as profoundly. It is a 
large part of education to develop them properly and 
to enable the individual to focus them on the right 
objects. 

A third group, important in all education, comprises 
certain expressive instincts whereby the natural 
outflow of youthful energy is guided. Since we really 
grow by what we do quite as much as by what enters 
into us, and since all children seek to express them- 
selves in one way or another, it is very important that 
their expression be connected with the best possible 
impulses on the inside and take the most wholesome 
forms outwardly. Chief among these forms of expres- 
sion are play, certain more serious types of activity 
which are often destructive, the effort to lead and to 
accomplish results, and the tendency to repeat 
actions that have given pleasure. 

2. Selection of appropriate motives. 

Out of these, and doubtless many other dominant 
motives and impulses of childhood, which are never 
of equal strength in any two children, we as parents 
and teachers must select from time to time the proper 
ones for use. We must find the proper order and 
degree of emphasis to enable us to help the child 
develop so that his impulses shall ultimately be rightly 
guided and controlled and balanced from within, 
under the force of his total character, rather than 
respond riotously to external circumstances solely. 
In an outUne discussion of this brevity it is not possible 



Certain Principles to Guide the Teacher 127 

to indicate all the important principles by which the 
teachers of children should be guided in motivating 
the moral and religious work undertaken by them, 
even if we knew them all, which we by no means 
do. Systematic work of this kind is really just begin- 
ning. Years of careful experimenting and careful 
testing of the results will be necessary to give us a 
scientific foundation for the work we are trying to 
do. In the statements which follow are incorporated 
merely some of the conclusions which seem most 
reasonable from the general study of education. While 
put positively and briefly, there is no wish to be 
dogmatic. 

3. Egoistic impulses arise early. 

In general, the self-seeking impulses appear in 
personality first, and early get headway and tend to 
dominate. The average religious teacher finds it 
hard to believe that these are not wholly of the 
devil. They do in very many of us come to run 
riot and are the basis of much that is low and 
unworthy. They are, however, apparently perfectly 
normal and have the definite function of building 
up and emphasizing the selfhood. Here belong such 
forms of self-assertion as contrariness, rivalry, fight- 
ing, desire to possess, striving for leadership, and 
so forth. 

4. Later origin of the unselfish motives. 
Ordinarily, the unselfish and social qualities of 

personality, which are equally normal and natural 
with the former, come later in life and should function 



128 Use of Motives 

in controlling, guiding and chastening the more selfish. 
Here come such impulses as confidence, sympathy, 
love, obedience, imitation and hero-worship, self- 
sacrifice for others, and their Hke. 

5. How recojicile these? 

The general task of the educator is so to stimulate, 
exercise, and guide the expression of these natural 
impulses, both selfish and unselfish, as they show 
themselves, that each shall make the permanent 
contribution to personality which the Creator in- 
tended it should make, and at the proper time retire 
into a place subordinate to the higher quahties as 
they come into view. The so-called lower impulses 
are not in themselves unholy; they only become so 
when they are abnormal^ developed, or are not sub- 
ordinated property to the better. 

6. Legitimate use of the self-seeking impulses. 

It is believed that the self-seeking impulses will 
dominate the later fife least if they are allowed their 
legitimate place in early hfe, being neither unduly 
suppressed nor overemphasized. Take, as an example, 
the very general desire to possess things. In early 
life, before the somewhat advanced idea of private 
property is fully reaUzed, many children, who by 
proper handling later develop into perfectly normal, 
well-behaved, self-controlled people, are disposed 
to take things which are not theirs. This is not at 
all uncommon among children. The future of these 
children is largely in the hands of their teachers. If 
this tendency and impulse to possess is recognized 



Certain Principles to Guide the Teacher 129 

as normal and having a place in life, and yet subject 
to control from within through other and higher 
tendencies, equally normal, — well. If it is unduly 
stimulated and exercised early in life it may readily 
take control of the life, as avarice. If, on the contrary, 
it is denied, derided, abused, arbitrarily suppressed, 
it is likely to result in thievery, coupled with avarice 
or with a reckless indifference to property both of 
self and others. Other of these deeply ingrained 
selfish motives obey similar laws. 

7. What we most need to learn. 

It follows, therefore, that the most serious tasks of 
parents and teachers of children are : first, to find the 
time and order of development of the dominant traits 
and qualities of our natures and the contribution 
they ought to make to character; and, second, to 
learn the degree of emphasis necessary to enable them 
to do this work and make their contribution to the 
higher qualities which cannot yet be appealed to 
directly, without giving them undue prominence 
in the permanent motives of the life. While we are 
getting some idea as to the answers to be given to 
these questions, no one at present would undertake 
to make a definite schedule; and, further, while we 
all follow somewhat similar courses in our develop- 
ment, no two individuals are exactly alike. This 
makes the task, in very large measure, one of indi- 
vidual study of individuals. This is where insight on 
the part of the parent and teacher is essential to 
success. 



130 Use of Motives 

8. The Sunday-school dilemma. 
Pedagogically, the dilemma of the Sunday school 

has been this: (1) Shall we motivate work which 
we feel to be worth while, though apparently not very 
attractive in itself, by concrete appeals to dubious 
motives, such as greed, rivalry, etc., that have no 
direct relation to the thing to be done but are big in 
the child and which may be unduly and even hurtfully 
stimulated by the appeal? Or (2) shall we try, with 
a very large risk of failure, to motivate the work 
merely by those larger appeals to the higher motives 
of duty and righteousness, which in the nature of the 
case cannot thus early have a big place in the child^s 
character? Each alternative has certain strength and 
weakness in a practical way. 

9. The upward-looking impulses. 

In this uncertainty (pictured in Section 8), the 
Sunday school has almost completely overlooked 
important means of motivation which have all the 
advantages of the more selfish appeals without their 
pedagogical and moral shortcomings. Of almost, if 
not quite, equal intensity with the more crass forms 
of selfish impulse, — as rivalry, gain, pride, etc., — 
are the impulses of curiosity, imitation, play, repeti- 
tion, and the expression of one^s leadership. At the 
beginning, possibly these motives are just as selfish 
as the others in that they originally minister to 
low forms of satisfaction; but they are more subject 
to refinement and are directly connected with the higher 
intellectual and spiritual capabilities and tendencies. 



Certain Principles to Guide the Teacher 131 

For example, curiosity is as powerful a motive as 
greed; but it leads directly to information, knowl- 
edge, breadth of vision. Greed cannot. Greed 
rather increases by what it feeds on, and lowers the 
resources of personality. The impulse to play and 
to do things, which is the other side of restlessness, 
is just as prevalent and strong as the feeling of rivalry; 
but it leads directly to activity, work, output, and 
skill, and only needs to be guided to be the most 
educative thing possible. It is not, like rivalry, in 
danger of degenerating into ugly and harmful per- 
sonal states. Finally, the impulse toward repetition 
is as strong and early an impulse as stubbornness; 
but it leads directly to habits and skill, through doing 
over and over attractive things. This formation of 
right habits is by all means the most helpful thing 
we can contribute to youth by our educational proc- 
esses. This, indeed, sums up the balanced result 
of all our purposes: right habits of thinking and 
speaking; right habits of choosing; right habits of 
action. 

10. Superiority of natural over artificial appeals. 

In conclusion, it seems that we should strive, as 
sponsors for the Sunday school, to make a more 
vigorous appeal to those impulses of childhood which 
are at once strong and prevalent, themselves capable 
of proper development and permanent refinement, 
and connect naturally with the higher qualities of 
wisdom, rightness, and self-control which we seek to 
gain. Concretely, should we not improve our peda- 



132 Use of Motives 

gogical position if we drop our dependence (for motiva- 
tion) on our picnics, our Christmas trees, our indi- 
vidual prizes and badges and medals, our stimulation 
of individual and class rivalries, and the like, mingled 
with some attempt at exciting fear for the hereafter; 
and substitute for these the biggest, sanest use we can 
make of the native curiosity of childhood, its impulse 
to imitate, its natural trustfulness and sympathy in 
and for all, its legitimate play instincts, its desire to be 
doing something and to be producing results, and its 
liking for leadership? It is surely true that there is 
enough in the lives of God's children since the race 
began, if properly handled, to appeal to his curiosity 
and lead it on; there is enough that is true and good 
in life now and in the past to win his sympathy and 
confidence and have them ripen into Christian faith 
and optimism; there is certainly enough to be done 
in his own life and relations to challenge and give 
scope [to his full expressive powers, no matter how 
much of a boy he may be, nor how much of a saint. 

11. Summary, 

To sum up, we may make great strides forward in 
getting our young people in accord with what we are 
trying to do for them by a conscious, wise, and per- 
sistent use of their natural, homely qualities. We 
desire them to have the disposition, the knowledge, 
the power, and the habit of making the righteous 
choice under all conditions. Through curiosity we 
motivate for knowledge; through restlessness and the 
instincts of play and leadership we motivate for 



Certain Principles to Guide the Teacher 133 

activity and work; through trustfulness and confi- 
dence and the impulses to share and serve we motivate 
the attitudes that elevate the emotions and desires 
and bring faith and optimism and love; and through 
the impulses to imitate and to repeat satisfying and 
pleasurable experiences we motivate for habit and 
skill. And in it all we see to it that the child experi- 
ences the satisfaction which a right choice should 
have, and the dissatisfaction which wrong choices 
bring. 



Topics for Further Study and Discussion 

1. The inevitable limitations of a character con- 
trolled solely by the external conditions: limitations 
in respect to happiness; in respect to the quality of 
the personality. 

2. The limitations of a personality controlled by 
impulse merely. 

3. Make a list of all the instincts which you recog- 
nize, arranged somewhat in the order in which you 
think they become important in influencing life. 

4. The natural impulses most liable to be neglected 
and undeveloped. 

5. Those most likely to be used and strengthened 
unduly and to become subject to abuse. 

6. Those which can safely be emphasized and refined 
throughout life. 



134 Use of Motives 

Suggestive Questions 
If we get a right action what difference does it 
make just which of the various possible impulses may 
be back of it? Why is it entirely appropriate that the 
more selfish instincts mature first? What is meant 
when it is suggested that the unselfish impulses and 
reason may come to inhibit the lower impulses? 
Why is much of life, especially immature life, a matter 
of inhibition? Why does inhibition mark progress? 
Why, in a really growing spirit, is inhibition more 
easy with time? When may we say that we are 
making natural, and when artificial, appeals? Why 
is one more valuable than the other? 

Some Practical Problems 

1. What practical problems arise from the fact 
that the selfish instincts mature before the unselfish? 

2. The practical dangers of making the grosser 
forms of selfishness permanent and dominant in life. 
Illustrate by self-will, gratification of the animal 
desires, desire to possess things, fighting impulse, 
anger, and the like. 

3. Enumerate, and estimate the value of, any 
practical methods that have been suggested to 
inhibit and diminish the strength of these undesirable 
impulses. For example: Bodily punishment and the 
fear of it; other forms of punishment, here and here- 
after; loss of approval and companionship of parents; 
public opinion; use of other active impulses that lead 
in other directions; sense of duty. Find others. 



Certain Principles to Guide the Teacher 135 

References 

Athearn: The Church School. The Pilgrim Press, 

Boston. $1.00 
Bagley: Educative Values. Part I. The Macmillan 

Co., N. Y. 
Galloway: Report of Committee on Fundamentals 

in School Science and Mathematics. Chicago. 
Galloway: Education of the Will, in Encyclopedia 

of Sunday Schools and Religious Education, 

Thomas Nelson and Sons, N. Y. 
Aims of Religious Education: Religious Education 

Association. Chicago. $1.00 



CHAPTER X 

FORMS OF EXPRESSIVE WORK SUITABLE TO 
SUNDAY SCHOOLS: HAND-WORK 

1. Review of the principle of expressional work. 

We have seen that instruction, impression and 
stimulation have been much more emphasized in 
Sunday schools than has the finding of ways to secure 
the carrying of these into actual practise in life. We 
have been too content to do our teaching as best we 
could and to leave to chance the '^ follow through '' of 
the teaching into conduct. In general education we 
have found that the best results come from a complete 
mental reaction, — instruction, self-active mental 
states, and suitable expression. In getting internal 
character it is as important to supervise and suggest 
the right forms of expression as to secure right stimuli. 
Inasmuch as all moral and religious qualities and 
states, in order to be of any value, must be one's very 
own, it becomes even more important here than in 
general education that the responses and conduct 
shall be rightly controlled from within. Therefore it 
is all the more essential that the child shall be insured, 
and inspired to have, adequate expression of his best 
moral and religious impulses. 

We have also noticed that expression educates 

137 



138 Use of Motives 

personality even more effectively than instruction, 
if it is properly graded. Expression must be very 
accurately graded, however, to the degree of develop- 
ment of the child. Otherwise we have an effort to 
express states which are not really experienced, 
and this is the essence of hypocrisy. Very many of 
the natural instincts look straight toward expression 
and action. This fact really indicates to us the rela- 
tive importance of expression in molding and fixing 
personality. It also makes it all the more binding that 
we Sunday-school teachers, in common with all 
other teachers of righteousness, shall find natural 
and suitable modes of expression for the normal 
impulses that can in any way be made to contribute 
to the disposition and habit of choosing the right. We 
must have right choice; and in consequence we must 
use the great, wholesome, internal impulses to motivate 
right choices and actions. 

2. Grades of expressional work in the Sunday school. 

While everything we do is very educative, and 
what we do with enthusiasm and zest is particularly 
so, it remains true that some forms of expression are 
more valuable than .others; just as some truths, 
while no more true, are more important than others. 
For example, making a map of Palestine or a model of 
the tabernacle is expressive work; and each of these 
things may be made so appealing to the boyish im- 
pulses as to secure a large amount and a fine quality 
of work, which will give him a mastery of facts that 
could not be secured in any other way. But neither 



Forms of Expressive Work 139 

of these forms of expression is as valuable as honest 
and honorable playing of a baseball game in the 
presence of the temptation to cheat or bully; or 
actually to uphold the right at any point in the face 
of opposition. 

For this reason it becomes important for us to 
make some analysis of the forms and grades of ex- 
pressive work if we are going to try to use the 
principles of motivation in reference to it. We have 
seen that activity is more easy to motivate than 
learning, because so many of our impulses run to 
action, and only a few to learning. We have found 
that action is more educative of personality than 
instruction is. It is therefore essential that we study 
most carefully the outlets of sound activity and the 
incentives to it which we Sunday-school teachers have 
at our command. 

We may roughly indicate the following types of 
expressional work: 

(1) Hand-worky of all kinds. This includes all the 
customary activities of hand and brain in which we 
work with materials. 

(2) Representative activity, including all sorts of 
repetitive, imitative, reproductive behavior. This 
embraces dramatization, plays, pageants, recitation, 
and the like in which emotions, ideals, and acts of 
other people are, through the imagination of the child, 
made his own temporarily and expressed in suitable 
ways. 

(3) Original activity, including all the student's 



140 Use of Motives 

own beha\ior in all his social relations. This is of 
course the real self-expression, and the thing we are 
seeking. 

It will be seen that these forms of expressional work 
are progressive in importance, and that (l) and (2) 
are valuable only as they lead in one way or another 
to the rightness of (3). 

3. Forms of hand-work suitable to the Sunday school. 

Important and valuable as this form of expression 
has aheady shown itself to be in itself and in motivat- 
ing Sunday-school attendance, good beha^-ior, and 
the stud}" of the Bible and other sources of human 
guidance, it is no part of the purpose of this book to 
dwell upon it. The pioneer work of Dr. Littlefield ^ is 
still the classic in this field, and the teacher must be 
referred to it for aU details of its use. Dr. Littlefield 
has recognized the follo^^ing helpful classes of hand- 
work for Sunday schools: 

(l) Illustrative work. This in all its varieties, 
whether of paper-tearing, drawings and colorings, 
modehngs of aU sorts of objects in plastic materials, 
or constructing of more permanent ones, is an effort 
to furnish means suitable to the child to express in 
material ways some part of an idea, or event, or story 
that may have come to him. It is the simplest and 
most concrete form of expressive work and has a 
range suitable to all from beginners to seniors. 

Its value Ues in these facts: it furnishes the teacher 

1 Hand-work in the Sunday School Milton S. Littlefield. The Sunday 
School Times Co. Philadelphia, 1908. 



Forms of Expressive Work 141 

a chance actually to understand where thepupiFs 
thoughts are, and to find out his powers of expression ; 
it helps the child to clarify his own ideas through the 
effort to express; it enforces a certain attentiveness 
to details which is the foundation of all worth-while 
character; it develops experience and skill in giving 
clear expression to internal states; and, best of all, it 
delights the young child with the satisfactions that 
cluster round normal activities and enlists the whole 
of himself in the making of much more effort than he 
would make for learning or any other form of progress 
for its own sake. In a word, it motivates experience, 
habit-formation, and learning. It depends on us 
whether the experiences and habits and information 
he gets are worthy. Clearly it is waste of time to try 
to motivate something which is not in itself worth 
while. Motivation is not an end in itself. 

(2) Geography work. This involves the using and 
making of maps and models by the pupil in order to 
express his knowledge of facts and to enable him 
better to visualize and appreciate the ideas that come 
to him in the more abstract form of words. Map and 
model making sounds rather formidable at first; and 
undoubtedly this will not stand slavish usage. How- 
ever, all pupils will have the biblical, or any other, 
story made more real for them if they have access to 
temporary or permanent topographic relief models 
which enable them really to grasp necessary facts. 
It is rarely the case that human movements are not 
made more appealing, particularly to young people, 



142 Use of Motives 

by a knowledge of the actual natural conditions in 
which they occurred. All this interest is enhanced 
and the knowledge made more permanent and exact 
if the pupils themselves are induced to make or color 
maps, and to model topography in the sand or other 
plastic material. In so far as this effort to represent 
conditions appeals to them they will do more work in 
getting all the facts and relations than can be secured 
from them in an}^ other way. If the facts are worth 
knowing at the outset, it surely is worth while to 
motivate the getting of them so that they may be 
accurately and permanently held, — and held in 
relationship to other facts. The mechanical part of 
map and model making wiU not appeal to all pupils 
equally, 

(3) Written work. In this form of expression scrap- 
books, note-books, answers to questions, essays and 
themes are produced. This form is not necessarily 
in itself appeahng to all pupils; but when once entered 
upon incites to more thorough work, secures accuracy 
of expression and thus exactness of ideas, and tends 
to unify the work and give it coherence. It will 
sometimes appeal to people who do not care for the 
more concrete and mechanical forms of expression 
outlined in (l) and (2). It readity combines with both 
illustrative work and geographic work. 

(4) Decorative work. This appeals to the esthetic 
instincts and is supplementary to all the others. 
There is no question that the beauty of form, of 
design, and of color by which note-books or theses 



Forms of Expressive Work 143 

or maps or models may be embellished is in itself a 
stimulus to many children. Many children may 
be induced to make something which can be beauti- 
fied when the mere making of the thing itself would 
not appeal to them at all. We shall not waste any 
time discussing whether it is worth while ever to 
do anything merely for the beauty of it. We feel 
sure, however, that when the desire to do things 
beautifully can be used to secure the better doing 
of things in themselves worth while, we are mak- 
ing a definite gain in invoking this motive. There 
is furthermore a distinct moral and spiritual gain 
whenever we succeed in associating the idea of beauty 
and the satisfactions that flow from it with our religious 
ideas and progress. This principle is at the basis of all 
ideas of the use of music and art in connection with 
our religious expression. This is peculiarly true of 
the form of expression we call worship. We need more 
carefully to study and use this relation between 
beauty and worship. 

(5) Museum or extension work. In a sense this 
is a means of motivating the other forms of hand- 
work. It implies temporary exhibits of all hand-work 
done in the Sunday school, and a permanent collection 
in geography room and museum of some of the best 
work done by the young people of different grades. 
There is no question that such an exhibit strongly 
stimulates the desire of the children to take part in 
the activities and to do the work as well as they 
can. This is an excellent device to motivate the 



144 Use of Motives 

more laborious forms of hand-work, as map making 
and note-book building. But this is by no means 
all. The preparation of such a temporary or perma- 
nent exhibit gives opportunity to secure a large 
amount of comparison and discrimination of values 
so as to be very much worth having if it had no other 
meaning. Such collections, furthermore, become 
most valuable sources in time for the aid of other 
pupils. It is scarcely necessary to say that as much 
of the work as possible in the building and caring 
for and displaying and demonstrating of such a 
collection to their parents and to others should be 
done by the pupils themselves. The desire for social 
approval becomes operative and an added satis- 
faction is furnished for all the work. 

4. Summary: The service that hand-work renders. 

It is important to remind ourselves, lest we make a 
fetish of it, of the place and the limitation of hand- 
work. It is in no sense an end in itself. Its values 
are in the fact that it leads to better ends. None 
of these products of the hand is itself greatly 
worth while. We could buy much better things. 
The prime value of this form of expressive work in 
Sunday schools is, first, that it recognizes and en- 
courages expression itself and does not allow us to 
stop with feeling and knowing; second, all of it 
reacts on personality in the form of better informa- 
tion, in more exact habits, and in skill in choice and 
expression; and, third, the very pleasure we get in 
doing things drags us on, not merely into doings, but 



Forms of Expressive Work 145 

into the learnings that enable us to do them better 
than we otherwise would do. In other words, any 
motives to which we can appeal in getting pupils to 
do things will multiply their desire to learn and to be. 
Thus we get our internal allies at work on our behalf 
in the most profound possible way. 



Topics for Further Study and Discussion 

1. Why expressive work is valuable. The end and 
object of it. 

2. Differing values of different kinds of expressive 
work. What determines the relative value? 

3. Motivation not an end, but a means. What is 
the end? 

4. Respect the difference of appeal which different 
kinds of expression make to different children, and to 
different ages. Why? 

5. The use of the motive of beauty to enhance the 
appeal to truth. The practical application of it. 

6. The social value of hand-work in the Sunday 
school. 

7. The home in relation to the hand-work of the 
Sunday school. 

Suggestive Questions 

Why is it that so many of our instincts tend to 
produce action? Significance of this in education? 



146 Use of Motives 

Is it your observation that children get more pleasure 
from learning or from doing things? What is the 
effect of doing things (as making a picture or a map) 
on the ideas of the child? What effect has executing 
an interesting piece of hand-work on attention and 
industry? What value in personal education and in 
self-respect has experience and a consciousness of 
skill in expressing? Which types of hand-work are 
more likely to appeal to boys? Which to girls? What 
are the practical values in having a Sunday-school 
department build up a temporary exhibit of hand- 
work? 



Some Practical Problems 

1. The practical problem of motivating home 
work on the Sunday-school lessons by means of hand- 
work. ' 

2. Parents or teachers need to find just what is 
the result of their teaching upon the inner life of the 
child. Can we do so? Our limitations; methods of 
discovering. 

3. Is it educationally worth while for the pupil to 
have a fair conception of the land of Palestine? Is 
it your observation that the average persons brought 
up in our Sunday schools have such a conception? 
Isn't it perfectly practicable to overcome this failure 
through a little intelligent use of hand-work in the 
early grades? 



Forms of Expressive Work 147 

References 

Goodrich: With Scissors and Paste. A. Flanagan Co., 
Chicago. .25 

Heffron: Lessons in Chalk Modehng. Educational 
Publishing Co., Chicago. $1.00 

Littlefield: Hand-work in the Sunday Schools. Sun- 
day School Times Co., Philadelphia. $1.00 

Maltby: Map Modehng. A. Flanagan Co., Chicago. 
.75 



CHAPTER XI 

FORMS OF EXPRESSIVE WORK: REPRE- 
SENTATION 

1. The essential nature of this form of expression. 

In hand-work we have the individual trying to 
express by material means some idea or fact or rela- 
tionship which he has discovered. In this second type 
of activit}^, which we have called representative, the 
person is endeavoring to give expression through 
voice or bodily action to ideas, incidents, personalities, 
relations, or principles. To do this it requires such 
a mastery of a situation through knowledge or imagi- 
nation that the individual puts himself temporarily 
in the place of the persons portrayed and tries to 
present the situation so that it may seem real and 
convincing. This is a higher and more vital form of 
expression than any hand-work can ever become 
because the individual is himself both the actor and 
the material with which the presentation is made. 
It is not so high, however, as original, self-determined 
behavior because it is an imitation. And yet, because 
imitation is always an important element in all 
human education, this mode of personal expression 
is profoundly important in the development of the 
moral and religious attitudes of children. However, 

149 



150 Use of Motives 

we have never made any systematic use of it in our 
Sunday-school program. 

2. The dramatic and play instincts in the child. 
One cannot have anything to do with children of 

the age of six to twelve years and not be impressed with 
the part which these impulses play in their spontane- 
ous life. Most children between these ages give a 
large part of their time to such ^^ make-believe '' rdles. 
They play the parts of parents, of soldiers, of school- 
teachers, of Indians, of bears, of trees, of fairies, and 
of railroad trains. There is scarcely anything in the 
whole realm of their knowledge that they do not at 
one time or another become. We have been inter- 
ested in this fact, but we have not consistently used 
it for educative purposes. An impulse that fills such 
a large need in the life of the child and gives him such 
consistent satisfaction must have a big value to his 
inner life. When we come to understand how to use 
it properly it will certainly help us in molding per- 
sonality. 

3. The qualities on which these instincts depend and 
the states to which they minister. 

It may help us in our effort to use this dramatic 
instinct to examine briefly the underlying states 
which feed it. It is clear in the first place that im- 
agination plays a big role here. In playing a part the 
child, unless the acting is mere direct imitation, is 
reimaging or reconstructing the person and the situa- 
tion which he is portraying. It is a matter of inter- 
pretation and appraisal as well as of imagination. 



Forms of Expressive Work: Representation 151 

On the other hand, in doing this the child must tem- 
porarily submerge his own personality. This is 
another form which imagination takes. It gives the 
child himself the imagined qualities of the object 
represented. The child can throw himself into the 
part without reserve. To do this he must dispossess 
himself. Imagination in childhood is peculiarly able 
to do this. The self-consciousness of later years 
tends to make it impossible then. 

This situation is full of very attractive esthetic and 
emotional states also. It is not rational; it depends 
on the qualities out of which sympathy, wonder, 
faith, worship and devotion come. It is thus closely 
allied with the deepest of our religious and spiritual 
states. In '^ Peter Pan ^' it was disbelief in fairies that 
made them impossible. It is this imagination and 
its correlated group of emotional states that make 
the Kingdom of Heaven the real realm of the child. 
It is rarely quite real to the normal adult. Further- 
more, the instinct of repetition aids the operation of 
the dramatic impulse. The child is usually willing 
to play over and over the roles in which it has once 
found pleasure. Thus the imaginary character grows 
and is enriched, and the states at first temporarily 
assumed tend to become permanent in the child. The 
child himself is being trained by the expression and its 
demands on his internal qualities. He is also taking 
on some coloring from the object he has been repre- 
senting. He has had practise in self-effacement. 

If these things are at all true we may hope, by some 



152 Use of Motives 

stimulus and supervision of the dramatic and play- 
expressions, not merely to develop these imaginative 
and emotional powers basal to spiritually minded 
personality, but also to minister to the internal ideals 
and standards that help determine choices. For 
example, a child could not frequently act the role of 
a '' good fairy '' and not have some of the attitudes 
of his own personality predisposed thereby to choice 
and action involving sympathy. A normal child 
cannot Continually '' make believe '' without having 
some ability of real belief come out of it. He tends to 
become what he represents. It becomes necessary 
therefore not only that the representing instinct 
should be used, but that it should be properly directed, 
and that the child's representative expressions should 
be sound. 

It is not impossible also, in highly imaginative 
children, to overdo this kind of work. It is possible 
to get too much of the withdrawal of the child's 
personality to make way for that to be represented. 
This is another reason why, as in play, the dramatic 
expressions should be wisely supervised and guided. 

4. The use of this in Sunday school. 

The teachers in English and history and other 
general subjects in education are learning that the 
play and acting instincts can be used in securing good 
response in these fields. Plays, dramas, pageants, and 
the like are devised to get the pupils into the spirit 
of literary or historic situations. Pupils will do much 
more enthusiastic work to prepare for such presenta- 



Forms of Expressive Work: Representation 153 

tions than it is possible to get by any other device. 
There is a growing conviction that something very 
interesting may be done for the motivation of chil- 
dren's study of the Bible by this means. We shall 
have to admit that our instruction in the Bible and 
related subjects has been none too good, and has 
never aroused any great interest or enthusiasm among 
children. We have never given it the full advantage 
of its strongest appeal. 

If we assume that the biblical facts are worth some- 
thing to the child, that the truths and persons and 
relations and principles presented there are true to 
the essential nature of life, it surely becomes important 
that the child should be brought to assimilate these 
things in a normal and complete way as he becomes 
able to do so, rather than to get them in a half-hearted, 
routine fashion, as is so often the case. Only by such 
vital assimilation can they really minister to the 
inner life and thus come to aid in our religious task 
of securing habits of right choice. It is believed that 
there is no way in which the biblical situations which 
are suitable for the child can be brought so thoroughly 
into the reach of personality as through such dramatic 
presentation. It is believed further that there is no 
other device which will send a Sunday-school class to 
the sympathetic study of some episode in the Bible as 
will the task of presenting that episode on some occa- 
sion, such as the opening exercises of the Sunday 
school. The dramatic presentation of an episode like 
that of the Parable of the Good Samaritan, or the life 



154 Use of Motives 

of Joseph, will motivate enthusiastic investment of 
time and energy on the part of a group of boys. It 
will secure the study of all the circumstances and of the 
spirit of the thing that nothing else can bring. If 
these passages contain anything worth while to the 
boys, this kind of attitude makes it very certain that 
they will get and assimilate much more of it than 
they will probably do in any other way. It is an 
ideal method of motivating certain passages so as to 
make them yield the maximum moral and religious 
value to the pupils. 

5. Forms of biblical representation. 

There are several forms of representative expression 
of the moral and religious ideas from the Bible and 
elsewhere within the reach of our Sunday schools. 
First, it is to be remembered that this is a form of 
expression and thus relates itself to the child's choices 
and conduct which, as we have said, have always a 
close relation to morals and religion. While the 
situations may not be original, they nevertheless re- 
quire choices on the part of the one expressing them, 
and under circumstances that make for sound de- 
cisions. Practise in making right choices, which 
one's nature approves, in imitating another's action 
is helpful in securing the power for oneself. In the 
second place the process itself is full of the imagination 
and sympathetic emotions which are basal to the 
religious and spiritual states. In the third place, in 
the Bible and similar literature we are dealing with 
material which is peculiarly rich in moral and spiritual 



Forms of Expressive Work: Representation 155 

incentives and inspiring to right choice. For all of 
these reasons biblical material is well suited to be 
used by children in these dramatic ways. The 
following forms are suggestive : 

(1) Story telling. This is one of the simplest drama- 
tic uses of the biblical material, and has come to 
be used in high degree and with excellent method 
and success in the early years of Sunday school. 
The children themselves should learn to tell the 
stories which illustrate the great truths they can 
appreciate. These truths thus become their own in 
greater degree. 

(2) Recitation, This is also a simple form of expres- 
sion which might well be used more than it is. We 
are all familiar with the use of this on such special 
occasions as Children's Day and Rally Day; but this 
does not exhaust the possibilities. The incentive of 
recitation in class or before the school may often 
stimulate mastery of great hymns, passages of scrip- 
ture, elevating rituals, and the like. The very act of 
becoming responsible for the presentation of some of 
these great things is in itself a valuable experience. 
The satisfaction of the public appearance with its 
sense of doing something worth while will motivate 
a large amount of effort to get a full mastery of the 
matter. Not all individuals, nor all ages, find this a 
stimulus, however. For example, there is a period 
of boyhood in which this would be the greatest possible 
bore. 

(3) Pageants. Young people of all ages enjoy 



156 Use of Motives 

pageants and mass displays of that kind. They have 
been used to great advantage in motivating historical 
study. Biblical and church history are rich in inci- 
dents which are most attractive and inspiring for this 
purpose. It would require much study and apprecia- 
tion of the essential conditions of the period to do 
such a thing well and convincingly. By using this 
method we harness the satisfactions of the dramatic 
motive and public appearance to the study of the 
Bible times and thus arouse curiosity and give to it 
an immediate aim. One advantage of pageantry is 
that it is so adaptable to all ages. 

(4) Plays and dramas. All that has been said of 
stories, recitations, dialogs, and pageants, may 
be said with even more force of these more exact and 
formal efforts to represent the life and truths of the 
Bible. We return to our illustration of the Parable 
of the Good Samaritan, given as a ten-minute opening 
exercise for Sunday school. For a class of twelve- 
year-old boys this would motivate an amount of study 
that no ordinary teaching will do. The love of the 
dramatic in the child would inspire in the making up of 
the dialog and the business; this desire to dramatize 
and present the story properly would lead to a study 
of the parable and the conditions surrounding it, im- 
possible to secure in any other way. During this 
process the spiritual and humane point of view of 
Jesus in the parable would be impressed in a most 
intimate and lasting way, not as a moral dragged 
in by the teacher, but as something absolutely 



Forms of Expressive Work: Representation 157 

essential to the understanding and the staging of the 
incident. 

The Bible is literally full of this dramatic matter 
true to our best appreciations of life; we are all but 
failing to bring it in any vital way to the real accep- 
tance of our boys and girls; they have dramatic and 
play instincts which will help accomplish what we 
wish. Are we going to use these natural allies in the 
child to the best advantage? Or shall we allow them 
to be dissipated on the picture shows? 

6. Summary of the educational value of the drama in 
Sunday-school work. 

In the presenting of dramatized biblical material 
by Sunday-school pupils there are three educational 
opportunities to be considered: (1) The construction 
of the dramas; (2) the preparation and presentation 
of the dramas; and (3), the observation of the per- 
formance by those who do not participate actively. 
Even for the last class, which has least opportunity 
to profit by it, the dramatic presentation of such inci- 
dents is more readily visualized and more remembered 
than any other form in which it is brought to their 
attention. In other words this which we have found 
peculiarly valuable as an expressive device for a few 
becomes also a good method of instruction for the 
others. 

Probably the work of building the dialog and arrang- 
ing the business is the most educative of all. This 
task requires the very best study, appreciation, and 
insight. It ought to be done by the pupils if possible. 



158 Use of Motives 

The selection of a suitable incident, the finding of the 
essential spirit of it, the determination of the method 
of presenting it, the choice of the right words and 
actions to bring out the vital meaning, are the very- 
essence of good Bible study. A good device is to 
allow older classes to develop plays suitable for 
younger classes to present; though even the younger 
classes will surprise those who have not tried it by 
their ability to do the work necessary to stage for 
themselves the more simple incidents. 

We have already dwelt sufficiently upon the edu- 
cational value of presenting the stories to the public. 
It is somewhat of the same nature as in the building 
of them, but rather less original. It is more spectacu- 
lar and has in consequence a stronger appeal to most 
children. The presence of an audience too has a 
stimulating effect to most children. Much the same 
mastery must be had of the essential meanings and 
of the manner of expressing them as in the construc- 
tion of the story. 

The structure and the presenting of such work by 
Sunday-school classes will undoubtedly be crude and 
amateurish. It is necessary for teachers early to get 
the understanding that the prime purpose is not 
artistry and a professional smoothness of acting. All 
that is essential in this respect is sufficient excellence 
and beauty to make the children themselves feel that 
they have succeeded. What we are seeking is appreci- 
ation, understanding, acceptance, and expression of 
the essential facts, truths, points of view, and values 



Forms of Expressive Work: Representation 159 

contained in the passage. The artistry is quite inci- 
dental if it only be as good as the child can do. 

7. Worship as an expressive activity. 

In the strictest sense perhaps worship is an attitude 
of the whole of the human spirit, rather than an 
expressive activity in the meaning in which we have 
been using the word. However, in childhood it 
probably must be considered an " exercise '' some- 
what similar in its nature to those discussed in this 
chapter. It calls for much the same internal qualities 
of imagination, wonder, faith, and self-effacement 
that are used and fed by dramatization. At first 
the child's worship is probably very much like its 
thoughts of fairy-land. At this stage it is likely to 
become rather a matter of words and routine. This 
state should not be allowed to become permanent. 
In mature life the early emotions of wonder and rever- 
ence should be enriched by knowledge and ideas into 
an emotional and intellectual companionship with the 
Author of life. 

In the Sunday school itself it is pretty well agreed 
that the great poetic and wonder passages of the 
Bible, the great hymns, some of the finer ritualistic 
utterances, and the moving prayers of the church 
may well be learned and uttered in much the same 
spirit as the dramatizations are mastered. It is felt 
that these cannot pass into consciousness without 
leaving there something which later will mean a 
worshipful spirit. 

Teachers and parents should help children find 



160 Use of Motives 

subjects for prayer suitable to their age and stage of 
development. Whatever else prayer may mean, there 
is no question that it acts in a highly valuable way 
by autosuggestion. In this way praying is similar 
to any other expressive act in molding the internal 
ideas, ideals, and standards in accord with it. The 
whole matter of the pedagogical use of prayer and 
the grading of prayer to the actual needs of the child 
must have more careful study than it has yet received. 

Topics for Further Study and Discussion 

1. The place of imagination in representative ex- 
pression. The place of imagination in faith and wor- 
ship. The possible relation of dramatic exercises to 
faith and worship. 

2. Imitation as a factor in the education of youth. 
Its possibilities in morals and religion. Some corol- 
laries of these facts. 

3. Is personality really influenced by the imaginary 
r61es which we assume as children in our reading and 
acting? Your own evidences. 

4. Having the children build up dialogs of the Bible 
stories as a teaching exercise. Methods; problems; 
values. 

5. Inducing the child to tell the stories versus 
repeated telling of them by the teacher. 

Suggestive Questions 

What observed proofs can you give that love of 
imaginary and dramatic situations furnish motives 



Forms of Expressive Work: Representation 161 

for childish activities? Why is the realm of spirit, — 
the " Kingdom of Heaven/' — more real to the 
normal child than to the normal adult? Is there any- 
practical value in this? Do you recall that you placed 
yourself, in your early reading, as the hero or heroine 
of the stories you read or plays you saw? Do you 
think that fact makes what one reads of more influ- 
ence in molding character? What is the fundamental 
meaning of the fact that all grades of people, from 
criminals to people of normal morals, choose the hero 
and condemn the villain in the melodrama? What are 
the educational corollaries of this? Why should the 
dramatic representations not be allowed to be an 
end in themselves? 

Some Practical Problems 

1. The practical need of supervised reading and 
dramatics, in the light of the childish tendency to 
adopt the roles that appeal to it. How to use these 
facts to best advantage in giving the child sound 
standards. 

2. How may we strengthen and make permanent 
the states of mind and choices that a child adopts as 
his own in his reading or the representation of a drama? 
How help the child carry them into practise? The 
necessary cooperation of teachers and parents. 

3. The practical problem of making most real and 
appealing to the child the spirit of the Bible stories. 
In order to do this what must be the teacher's attitude 
toward the Bible? Toward the child? 



162 Use of Motives 

References 

Athearn: The Church School, pp. 193-205. The 

Pilgrim Press, Boston. $1.00 
Bryant: How to Tell Stories to Children. Houghton 

Mifflin Co., Boston. $1.00 
Chamberlin and Kern: Child Religion in Song and 

Story: University of Chicago Press. $1.25 
Eaton: Dramatic Studies of the Bible. The Pilgrim 

Press, Boston. .75 
Hartshorne: Worship in the Sunday School. 
Johnston and Barm: A Book of Plays for Little 

Actors. American Book Co., N. Y. .30 
St. John: Stories and Story Telling. The Pilgrim 

Press, Boston. .50. 



CHAPTER XII 

FORMS OF EXPRESSION: ORIGINAL 
PERSONAL BEHAVIOR 

1. Introduction. 

After all is said about impression, instruction, 
hand-work, and dramatization of fine incidents as 
means to help secure right character and habits of 
right choice, none of these compare with the making 
of actual, original, and suitable choices and responses 
in the face of the actual situations which confront 
our own lives. These other things are aids to study 
and to conduct, but life is the real clinic of moral and 
religious education. It is here that habits of right 
choice and actions are formed. Our churches and 
Sunday schools have not properly realized that their 
work for morals and religion is very likely to be lost 
unless they can find a way to help the training to 
actual expression in the home, on the street, in the 
school, at play, at work, and in private. We ought, if 
possible, in Sunday school to find or arouse motives 
that will make right choices surer, not merely in 
Sunday school but outside. We must, furthermore, 
find means of coordinating our efforts with those of 
parents, school teachers, boys' secretaries, juvenile 
courts, and all grades of social workers with children. 

163 



164 Use of Motives 

The steps in this coordination must be experimental 
and practical. 

2. Furnishing motives for conduct y or practise in 
righteousness. 

This is of course at the very crown of the expressive 
work of the Sunday school, of which hand-work and 
dramatization are only beginnings. It is, however, 
in practise, as we have repeatedly suggested, the 
weakest point of the whole Sunday-school effort; 
and W3 must regard our work as a failure in so far 
as we fail to get our pupils to carry into the practise 
of individual and social life the impressions they 
receive. It is not enough to teach righteousness in 
our schools, — even though we have all our pupils 
deeply enthusiastic in the study of all the biblical 
examples of honesty, truthfulness, purity, obedience, 
etc., — and then leave the putting of these ideals into 
practise to become a sort of haphazard by-product of 
this teaching modified by the accidents of life. Unless 
the Sunday school succeeds in getting the boy to 
connect the teachings of honesty on Sunday with the 
propriety of being honest in the ball game on Monday 
he is really worse off than if he had not been taught. 
Unless he is a more obedient and considerate boy 
in the home, our teaching about obedience is a 
failure. 

We must therefore make a closer connection be- 
tween our moral teaching and the practical behavior 
in the home, at school, in the games, and on the 
street. We must motivate in some strong way this 



Forms of Expression: Personal Behavior 165 

practical life of the pupil. The every-day, expressive 
life of the boy is much more attractive to him than 
the theoretical teachings. It is more genuine and is 
a better test of the nature of personality. It is more 
educative. How can we motivate it? 

The writer has no complete answer to this question. 
This is the region of our most promising future in- 
vestigation. We can only illustrate the possibilities 
here. The problem briefly stated is this: We want 
to secure right knowledge, right desires, and right 
conduct both in the Sunday school and in life; we 
have the children only a few minutes in Sunday school. 
Our first task is to motivate right conduct within the 
Sunday school; and our second to devise ways to 
enlarge these motives to life outside. For this reason 
the appeal to motives must be natural and ring 
absolutely true to real life. If it does not it will be 
left behind as the pupils pass out through the doors, 
and rightly. Our most natural and easy step is to 
the life in the home. We must at every point touch 
hands with the parents. They must help us to secure 
the translation of instruction into life. 

3. An illustration: giving. 

Take, for example, the matter of giving j as a means 
of expression of interest, and also as a means of edu- 
cation of attitudes and habits of action. It is pretty 
safe to say that the usual method of Sunday-school 
giving, which it is unnecessary to describe here, is 
almost destitute of educative (or human) value. 
Could not a great increase in habits of generosity 



166 Use of Motives 

and of sympathetic action be made if the church 
would include in its own budget the expenses of the 
Sunday school; eliminate the process of giving just 
for the sake of having money in the treasury; and 
allow the Sunday school, as a whole or through its 
different classes, to work up interest in and devote 
their offerings to definite, fine, human purposes? How 
much of interest in humanity, open-heartedness, sym- 
pathy, and self-sacrifice could be developed about the 
act of giving when motivated by acute personal inter- 
est in the object of the giving! Great human causes 
could thus be brought, week after week, to the 
attention of the children. By grading these appeals 
very carefully to the children's ability to respond with 
a whole heart, we could secure in them habits of 
giving heartily and wisely to the needs of the race. 
Missions, local church enterprises, organized local 
charities, fresh-air funds, and scores of religious 
and humanitarian activities could be brought to their 
earnest attention through the motive of the query in 
their own minds: ''What shall we vote to help 
with our money next week? '^ Similarly, in individual 
classes, it would be possible to give something of the 
Sunday-school atmosphere to daily life by a search 
for genuine needs which the members of the class 
might undertake to help in some discriminating way. 

4. The task. 

Is it not possible, in a similar way, to take certain 
other motives and desires and interests which our 
children have, and in our Sunday-school classes de- 



Forms of Expression: Personal Behavior 167 

vise ways whereby these desires may be brought to 
express themselves rightly out in the world where the 
children live? Or we may approach it from the other 
side and decide upon certain types and habits of 
conduct which the children ought to practise, and 
then see whether we cannot discover some internal 
motives which, by a little encouragement and guid- 
ance, will impel the child to do the kinds of things 
that will develop these habits. 

Most of us realize that it is much more easy to 
impart information than it is to get right conduct, 
which is to get instruction converted into conduct. 
Even in those Sunday schools in which most has been 
done to grade the intellectual and emotional instruc- 
tion to the needs and capabilities of the child, little 
has been done in a conscious way to connect the 
emotional and intellectual states with the practical 
choices and activities of life. After teaching the 
children, we have left them pretty much to the 
hazard of chance events to get practise in carrying 
out the things we have taught. This is not fair to the 
child. His inexperience is not equal to the situation. 
It makes it too easy for him to drop into the bad 
habit of divorcing in his own mind the teaching of the 
school and the acts of his life; of disjoining his inter- 
nal standards and states from his conduct. This is 
always destructive of personality. 

As religious teachers, then, we must do three 
things: (1) we must get right convictions and ideas 
of life in the minds of the children, through the use 



168 Use of Motives 

of the finer native motives and impulses; (2) we must, 
by a similar use of the natural motives and tendencies, 
secure actual practise in right U\4ng; and (3) we 
must succeed in connecting the practise with the 
teaching, so that personality will not only have both 
sound convictions and right habits, but a perfectly 
open roadway hetv:een. Every agency interested in 
the child must work together if this is to be done. 

5. The possibilities. 

In this most vital of all tasks of securing right 
conduct controlled from within by right convictions, 
we need the help of every native childish motive that 
can be made to contribute to the result. What one 
does is more educative than what one is taught; 
what one does, impelled by one's own interests and 
by the satisfaction one gets in the doing, is more 
educative than things done without these accompani- 
ments. Just as there are personal desires making the 
process of learning more meaningful, so there are de- 
sires leading to personal satisfactions that mRke conduct 
more meaningful. B}^ appeahng to these it is possible 
not only to strengthen the child against the difficult 
chances of his life, but to make these life experiences 
have a fuller educational value for still later times. 
This field of Sundaj'-school pedagog}^ is almost \irgin, 
but it is the belief of the writer that it has great 
possibihties. This point of attack has demonstrated 
its value in all secular education. It is proposed here 
to make hfe the chnic of the Sunday school, in some- 
what the same way that the hospital has been con- 



Forms of Expression: Personal Behavior 169 

nected with the medical school; that the shop and 
laboratory have been added to the classroom. 

6. Some dangers, 

A little thought makes it quite clear that there are 
some dangerous things to be avoided here. The 
motives appealed to and the stimuli applied must be 
chosen with keen insight into the stage of development 
of the child. So, also, must the practical expression 
in life be on the grade of his development. If these 
things are too mature and advanced it is quite possible 
to produce a state of pretense and hypocrisy, far 
removed from what we desire. If the appeal is to 
outgrown motives we are liable to another form of 
failure scarcely less fatal. 

7. Soine methods. 

In the light of these suggestions our specific tasks 
are these: (1) to find the childish impulses and desires 
that lead the child most surely toward right expres- 
sion; (2) to find ways in the Sunday school to arouse 
and increase the child's consciousness of, and satis- 
faction in, those impulses which are most valuable 
in life, and to relate these desires to the things he is 
learning in the school and doing in his home; (3) 
to find special forms of personal and collective expres- 
sion suitable to the development of the child, at once 
worthy and liable to give him satisfaction in the doing 
rather than in the mere reputation of having done 
them; and (4) to find a means of enabling the teacher 
and pupil to consider together the degree to which 
the particular effort has succeeded or failed, and 



170 Use of Motives 

thus strengthen the feeHng of responsibiUty for the 
result, and the connection of cause and effect. 

A few illustrations of what is possible are suggested 
below. It must be recalled that these proposals are 
only suggestive. This is a realm for scientific edu- 
cational experimentation rather than for emphatic 
or dogmatic statement of conclusions at present. 
It is the purpose of this book to arouse teachers and 
parents to thoughtfulness and to experimentation 
upon this subject rather than to claim that proper 
methods are certainly known. 

8. Motivation of right conduct through sympathy j 
a desire to serve, and kindred qualities coupled with 
desire for approval. 

There is no question that the young child has these 
qualities nor that they make it possible for him to get 
pleasure and satisfaction out of doing things which 
ordinarily, but for them, he would be quite unwilling 
to do. They furnish a powerful means of checking 
or inhibiting selfish actions, and thus of opening 
the consciousness to the satisfactions of unselfishness. 
These are qualities which may be safely strengthened 
and increased. They need to become habitual until 
they can safely stand even without the gratification 
of external approval. These sympathetic motives are 
in some danger of dissipation and decay in the active 
relations of life. Teaching about sympathy and social 
service does not meet the need. Citing instances 
calculated to arouse it, if not followed by actual 
appropriate expression, is liable to develop the feeUng 



Forms of Expression: Personal Behavior 171 

that sympathy is a mere emotion. What we want is 
to follow instruction with a clear, definite clinic of 
worthy, useful, satisfaction-giving, sympathetic be- 
havior, with chance to repeat it over and over, in 
connections that are interesting and do not present 
too many nor too strong other native tendencies that 
would work in the opposite direction. It would not, 
for example, be judicious to make a twelve-year-old 
boy choose between what we are speaking of and his 
game of ball. It is not necessary to invite certain 
defeat at the outset. Some day, if matters have been 
properly worked, we may have the pleasure of seeing 
him drop out of a game, of his own accord, to gratify 
a higher impulse. 

The necessary steps would be something like these : 

(1) the teacher would portray to the individual pupil, 
or to the class if it is to be made a class activity, some 
instance of human need or limitation of a kind to 
appeal to the stage of development of the pupils; 

(2) he should indicate, or have the class decide, what 
can be done for relief, being sure that it is not beyond 
their capacity either for assimilating or doing; (3) 
he should get definite responsibility located on each 
pupil for a definite part of the service; (4) he should 
see that the report of the work of each pupil comes, 
without exaggeration, clearly before the class and 
before the parent or some one whose opinion the pupil 
prizes; (5) if possible there should also be a report to 
the child of some good and happiness that has come 
to another through his work. 



172 Use of Motives 

The writer believes that the moral effect of this 
kind of thing is strengthened in the child if occasion 
should offer that the pupil, or some one in whom he is 
interested, should become the object of similar con- 
sideration. This makes him realize how the other 
'person feels. 

9. Use of the quality of chivalry in motivating 
conduct. 

This motive is one of some strength fairly early in 
the life of the boy. It is a mixture of growing con- 
sideration for others, self-respect, and desire for the 
respect of others. It rises in normal boys of twelve 
to sixteen promptly, on proper stimulation. Appeals 
to this impulse should lead to actual practise in 
courtesy to the aged and to women; increased con- 
sideration to mother and sisters or other women 
members of the home; the espousing of the cause of 
the weak rather than the strong; self-control in the 
face of temptation to do things that would forfeit 
one^s own respect. The courteous street and home 
behavior and amenities belong here in part. Coupled 
with the love of the other sex, which is liable to play 
some part in the emotional hfe of adolescent children, 
this quality of chivalry can easily be used in estab- 
lishing and strengthening standards and habits of 
personal purity. There is no question that the 
Sunday schools have some duty in regard to this 
momentous human problem, which educators are 
quite generally coming to consider as in large part an 
educational one. 



Forms of Expression: Personal Behavior 173 

10. Appeal to the spirit of tractahility or obedience 
to authority. 

Assuming that there are relations of reasonably 
cordial appreciation between teacher and pupil 
(and certainly moral and religious education is 
scarcely thinkable without), the teacher can count 
upon a certain amount of this motive in the average 
child, and use it to secure responses and practises 
which would not in themselves appeal strongly to 
children. It is best not to use this motive, standing 
alone, too often nor too strongly, nor even in- 
discriminatingly; but it supports and supplements 
other appeals. The sane use of it leads toward a law- 
abiding attitude later. Supported in its turn by the 
desire for approval, and by the impulse of imitation, 
and that of hero-worship, it often enables the teacher 
to secure actions and attitudes and habits of the 
utmost educative value. There is scarcely an activity 
or relation in all the student^s life which cannot be 
included in the definite program of moral practises 
by the help of these qualities: general behavior 
at home, at school and on the street may be influenced ; 
relations to and treatment of companions in work 
and in sports; honesty and true sportsmanship in 
games; keeping the spirit of the Sabbath; obedience 
to any of the divine rules of life; personal habits in 
relation to many types of temptation, all these 
may very well become, consciously, fields in which 
the pupil may be induced to try to put into practise 
the teachings of the classroom. The desire to obey 



174 Use of Motives 

and please a teacher in whom the pupil has confidence 
will often help secure right choices from the pupil. 

In conclusion the writer is convinced that the 
teacher can get closer to pupils and make his personal 
character and influence count more with them through 
this mutual joining of their resources in the active 
expression of life than is possible in the ordinary class- 
room instruction. It is in working out the program of 
moral activity that the teacher will best learn the 
real nature of the pupils in his charge, and impart to 
them whatever inspiration his character holds. In 
other words it is in expression rather than in instruc- 
tion that the motives of obedience, imitation, and 
hero-worship take the qualities of the teacher and 
raise them to the n^^ power in influencing life. 

11. Motivation of life in the home. 

Reference has been made to the fact that the 
translation of teaching into action demands an alliance 
between all the friends of the child. The work of the 
Sunday-school teacher must be consciously articulated 
with all the agencies that touch the child. For certain 
reasons, however, well realized by most teachers, it is 
peculiarly essential that the teachers and the parents 
be working in harmony for the child. Aside from the 
profound importance of the early homelife on the char- 
acter of the child, the home is on the whole the 
most sympathetic and easily accessible to the teacher 
of all the realms of childish activity. There ought to 
be a specially close understanding between the 
Sunday-school teachers and the parents as to what 



Forms of Expression: Personal Behavior 175 

should be sought for in the way of internal qualities, 
and what methods are most likely to secure them. 
The beginnings of all the moral and religious qualities 
should come of course in the home; but may we not 
say that it is the peculiar duty of the home to secure 
attitudes of obedience, cheerfulness, helpfulness, 
cooperative sharing of life and its obligations, industry, 
honesty, and the like? 

It is by no means the province of this book to show 
the steps by which all these Christian graces shall be 
made habitual. It is the purpose rather to suggest 
principles that must be applied and to give illustra- 
tions which will enable the teacher and parent to 
study the particular cases appreciatively, and make 
their own selection of steps. As a matter of fact the 
question of obedience is probably settled favorably 
or unfavorably in the case of most children before 
the Sunday-school teacher has much to do with the 
child. Nevertheless the Sunday school and the 
minister are in a position to bring to mothers and 
fathers in the home much that will tend to overcome 
the rough and ready disposition to control children 
by caprice and impulse. Indeed parents need as 
much help as the children. 

Attitudes of disobedience can be broken up; but 
it is much better and easier to form the attitude of 
obedience at the beginning. This does not at all 
mean that the child is merely to be forced in the 
beginning to do what another person chooses. He 
must be the one that chooses to obey. To teach 



176 Use of Motives 

obedience is not to talk about obedience; it is to 
place the child in situations that call for obedience, 
under circumstances at first where obedience will be 
relatively easy; it is to secure first acts of obedience 
in directions toward which the impulses of the child 
naturally lead; it means that the child should get 
the rewards in the satisfaction of approval and sym- 
pathy and fellowship that follow. It implies confi- 
dence and ground for confidence in the parent. It 
means no vacillation in the parent. It means that 
always without exception the parent's requests or 
commands shall be supreme. This makes necessary 
that commands shall ahvays be just and right; that 
the withdrawal of favor shall always follow dis- 
obedience; that there shall never be more satisfaction 
to the child in disobeying than in obeying. If the 
demand is for something really difficult for the child, 
it should be lightened and motivated by satisfactions 
which will make it easier to do than not to do. These 
satisfactions and dissatisfactions should not be 
artificial, but should be natural to the relations of 
parent and child and to the particular problem at 
hand. 

There is no gain in invoking the instincts of re- 
bellion and self-will, and then undertaking to ^' break '' 
these by force. A complete attitude of obedience in 
the home and elsewhere may be secured by making 
obedience easy and pleasant until the impulse is 
strong and then gradually extending it to more diffi- 
cult things. 



Forms of Expression: Personal Behavior 177 

One other illustration: the attitude of helpfulness 
and cooperation. We may admit that the impulses 
leading in this direction are not strong in the child 
at the outset; that the tasks it can perform are not 
particularly interesting to it; that it very perversely 
prefers to help in tasks that it cannot do; that its 
play is much more appealing to it. And yet any 
normal child may be brought without great difficulty 
to do his part in the home duties promptly, cheerfully, 
and even enthusiastically, if the parents are really 
concerned to have it so. The value of such training 
to the child is inestimable. 

How is this to be done? We must again assume 
that the life and attitude of the parents are such that 
there is on the part of the child confidence and fond- 
ness, some desire to have their approval, some distress 
at lack of companionship and sympathy. If these do 
not exist there is something radically wrong with the 
parents. The parents must assume the social atti- 
tude, — the democratic sharing of life, a competition 
of unselfishness toward one another. The child must 
have the full opportunity to become one of this 
group; must share its joys if he tries to do so, must 
be deprived of its satisfactions if he does not. He 
must be held to the laws of the group and not be 
allowed to gratify selfish impulses at its expense. He 
must grow to feel that the labors and difficulties and 
adversities are shared in order that the gains and 
joys and recreations and comforts may be shared. 
It may be taken for granted that real parents will 



178 Use of Motives 

see to it that the child^s satisfactions are artificially- 
sure and artificially rich without making them un- 
related to the pleasures of the group, or allowing 
them to minister to an attitude of selfishness on the 
part of the child. 

In a very similar way parents may secure, and our 
religious workers may help them to secure, ideas and 
habits of honesty, promptness, duty, virtue, truth- 
fulness, and indeed anything else that they may 
really desire in the character of the child, not through 
preaching, but through the proper motivation of 
choices in terms of the natural instinctive endowments 
of the child. The common principle in all of these 
enterprises is that at the beginning the task shall 
seem as easy to the child as possible, shall always be 
rewarded by satisfactions sufficient to enlist the desires 
in its behalf, and shall progress into a habit and atti- 
tude of personahty. 

12. A suggested program of graded social expression. 

It is intended that what follows shall be only sug- 
gestive. Churches and teachers must work out their 
own programs in the light of all existing conditions. 
We may include under this head all activities that look 
toward other individuals. The service may take the 
form of gifts of money or materials or of personal 
service. It may be rendered to individuals or to 
causes. It may be rendered by individuals or by a 
class acting together or by a whole school. It may 
be practised daily and weekly as a regular part of the 
work or may in addition be concentrated upon special 



Forms of Expression: Personal Behavior 179 

occasions, as Easter, Children's Day, Thanksgiving, 
and Christmas. These latter should not be neglected, 
but it is not wise to teach children that it is right to 
reserve their social services for these special times. 
In all this work the teacher should not forget for a 
moment that we are seeking to develop a genuine and 
lasting internal sympathy and generosity of spirit, 
and that this is the legitimate outcome of sympathetic 
action followed by the satisfaction that comes from 
the happiness of others. All this kind of expression 
must be closely graded to the stage of development 
of the child. We spoil it all if we demand the im- 
possible. The field of social expression for the child 
includes the home first of all, the class members, the 
home Sunday school and church, the local com- 
munity and its special social enterprises, and the 
world needs and movements. Clearly the first steps 
must be very close and concrete and personal to the 
child. Later in youth the interests broaden and may 
become more abstract and idealistic. Some such 
program as this is necessary in order to carry our 
teachings into choice and expression. 

(l) Beginners' Department (Kindergarten grades: 
years four to five). 

(a) The general field of expression: the home and 
the class; for children of the same age; concrete and 
personal. 

(6) The native impulses to be utilized for motivation 
of expression : sympathy, kindliness, gratitude, obedi- 
ence, imitation, desire to be active, desire to please. 



180 Use of Motives 

(c) Type of instruction: about child life, local and 
distant; about the home and parents, and the com- 
forts and advantages of having them; the child's 
power to add to the happiness of the parents; largely 
b}^ means of pictures and stories. 

(d) Special forms of expressive service: thought- 
fulness and obedience to parents in the home; con- 
sideration for other pupils in the class; gifts of pictures 
and toys, or picture books to individual children who 
lack them, or to children's homes or hospitals and 
the Uke; kindness to all. 

(2) Primary Departme7it{GT8ides one to three; years 
six to eight). 

(a) The general field of expression: the home, the 
class, the Sunday school, the school relations; for 
children and helpless people generally. Still needs to 
be concrete and personal rather than abstract and 
general. 

(6) The native impulses to be utilized: imitation; 
impulse to be doing things; play; obedience, repeti- 
tion; sympathy for distress in animals and people; 
spirit of wonder. 

(c) The type of instruction: continuation of stories 
about children of the same age; the needs of, and the 
work being done for, children in cities and abroad; 
heroic work done by missionaries, teachers, nurses, 
and other social servants; home duties and privileges 
of children; duty of reverence and worship. 

{d) Special forms of expressive service : right home 
attitudes and activities; right attitudes toward mates 



Forms of Expression: Personal Behavior 181 

in school and Sunday school; fair play; animal rescue 
work; gifts of material or money especially for enter- 
prises for help of children; suitable acts of worship. 

(3) Jwmor Depar^men^Grades four to seven; years 
nine to twelve). 

(a) The general field of expression: the home, the 
class, the school, the play group C* gang ''), the com- 
munity, the world. 

(6) The native impulses to be utilized : restlessness 
and activity; hero-worship and imitation; combative- 
ness and fighting; collecting impulse; play; the 
^^ gang '' instincts; desire for leadership, etc. 

(c) The type of instruction: about heroes; the 
heroic extension of Christian work the world over; 
the great workers of the local community and how 
they are doing their work; the problems of the class 
and of the local Sunday school and church; the need 
of money and of services; a continuation of some of 
the teaching of the former grades. 

(d) Special forms of expressive service: honesty and 
fairness in games; loyalty to the group to which he 
belongs; calling on or otherwise remembering sick 
or absent members of the class; volunteer messenger 
service for pastor or superintendent; increasing the 
Sunday school; boys' clubs, girls' clubs; Camp 
Fire Girls, Boy Scouts, and the like; chorus choirs or 
glee clubs for the Sunday school; giving of money; 
collecting magazines or other articles for institutions; 
preparing suitable gifts for some definite mission 
about which something special had been learned. 



182 Use of Motives 

Toys, games, puzzles, stamp collections, post-card 
collections, dolls, scrap-books, and the like for the 
children of distant communities may mean much 
more both to giver and receiver than money. These 
call for time, thought, ingenuity, sympathy and 
imagination. 

(4) Intermediate Department (High^school grades; 
years thirteen to seventeen) . 

(a) The general field of expression: the home, the 
Sunday school and church, the community, the world. 
In this adolescent time the objects of service may be 
more remote, less concrete, more ideal than in earher 
days. 

(6) The native impulses to be utilized: self-asser- 
tion; leadership; mastery; love of approval; intellec- 
tual questionings and searchings; idealistic and social 
sympathies; sex impulses and impulses of chivalry; 
worship of the heroic and the Divine. 

(c) The type of instruction: of the great, firm, 
reasonable human beliefs; of the great masterful 
men; of the qualities necessary to achieve real 
success; of public opinion at its best; of the great 
humanity-saving institutions and movements, their 
ideals and work (as schools, churches, societies for 
uplift, missions, etc.); of the best expressions and 
aspirations of the optimist; of the ideals of purity and 
the single standard of sex morals; of the great barriers 
to human progress. 

(d) Special forms of expressive service: special 
Sunday-school and church tasks; helping in any 



Forms of Expression: Personal Behavior 183 

forms of local community service, as united charities, 
social settlements, Y. M. C. A's. and Y. W. C. A's., 
playground associations, flower missions, civic im- 
provement associations, purity leagues, etc.; organiz- 
ing and leading the groups of younger boys and girls 
of the Sunday school in their expressive work; help- 
ing the '^ kid brother '^ find himself; looking out for 
boys and girls of their own age who do not have 
homes of their own in the city; helping support 
some foreign enterprise in the mission field; talking 
and leading in prayer in the young people^s societies; 
tithing the income for benevolent purposes; personal 
purity for the sake of society. 

(5) The Senior Department (College grade: years 
eighteen to twenty-two). 

The impulses here are much the same as in the 
last group, except that the individual, especially if he 
does not go to college, begins to take on the re- 
sponsibilities of m^ature life. This is an age of 
questioning old beliefs and of permanent individual 
adjustments intellectually, socially, and economically. 
The thing needed to save from catastrophe at this 
time is a wise and strong appeal to the expression of 
those human sympathies and impulses to service so 
characteristic of late adolescence. The teaching 
ought to be related closely to what the young person 
needs to know to make him a sane and efficient unit 
in society. 

The field of service here is the whole range of 
human need. Some particularly appropriate expres- 



184 Use of Motives 

sions are: teaching classes of boys and girls, and 
sening as officers in the Sunday school; playground 
and athletic super^ision for younger children: teach- 
ing Enghsh and civics to foreigners; singing and 
entertainments in ahnshouses, hospitals, and detention 
institutions; any sort of service for people who are 
shut in for any reason; defense of the weak; rural 
community ser^-ice: cooperation with all kinds of 
social uplift movements; interdenominational expres- 
sions of the Christian spirit. 

13. Conclusion. 

The writer has failed in his statement of this prob- 
lem if the reader thinks that it means just a little 
more, and more \'igorouSj preaching that the child 
should carry into practical hfe the principles of 
honesty, truthfulness, purity, and reverence taught 
in the Sunday school. The point is that we must, as 
Sunday-school workers, help the student to find in 
the home, in school, and on the street the actual 
laboratory and chnic of right resolves; and must 
help dehberately to stimulate the specific motives 
that will insure in him an effort to carry these right 
purposes into effect. We should not leave to chance 
this last; crowning step of all teaching, — the expres- 
sive reaction of the life to truth. We must find a 
way to help him make the right choices and inhibit 
the wrong ones; we must guide him into the satis- 
factions that come from right action and into the 
discomforts that come from wrong action; and we 
must continue to do this until we have fixed him in 



Forms of Expression: Personal Behavior 185 

the ability, the desire, and the habit of making right 
choices. In doing this we must bring our work more 
and more vitally and sympathetically into coordina- 
tion with the home, the playground, and the school. 

Topics for Further Study and Discussion 

1. How can the Sunday school cooperate with the 
home in such a way as to carry over the impressions 
of the school into the choices and actions in the home? 

2. Similar coordination of the Sunday school and 
public school: Possibility; method. 

3. Similar coordination of the Sunday schools and 
the supervised play. 

4. Find motives for being truthful. What supple- 
mentary inner tendencies of the child may be used to 
reinforce these? What are usually the inner motives 
for falsehood? How meet and minimize? 

5. Treat similarly purity; honesty; fairness; in- 
dustry; consideration for the aged. 

6. Enlarge in detail the steps in section 7 of this 
chapter. 

Suggestive Questions 

What method does your Sunday school use to 
train pupils in giving for benevolent purposes? Could 
it be improved? A real interest in the object of giving 
is more important than the giving itself. Is there any 
training in this interest? Can you suggest possible 
steps that would better educate this generous atti- 
tude? Is it not possible to make the pupils realize that 



186 Use of Motives 

we are called upon to give more than money? If you 
were seeking to get an average girl of thirteen to be 
wiUing to help her mother more, what of her internal 
impulses and motives v\^ould you appeal to? What 
internal tendencies would you probably need to over- 
come? If you desired to modify the fighting instinct 
of a thirteen-year-old boy, how would you appeal? 
What is the advantage of using first one and then 
another impulse in such cases? Map out just as 
strong a program as you can in each case. As a 
teacher how could you plan cooperation with the 
parents in these cases? As a parent how could you 
cooperate in these things with the Sunday-school 
teacher? Do you really believe that much of our 
failure is due to lack of cooperation among the 
agencies at work for the child? What then? 

Some Practical Problems 

1. To secure honesty and fairness to playmates in 
play. 

(1) The teacher must make very clear and real to 
the individual and to the class the right and admirable 
attitude in these things, citing inspiring instances of 
it and its satisfactions. 

(2) He must secure the mental assent of the indi- 
vidual and the class to this, and a resolution to carry 
it into effect on the playground. Must get a feeling 
of responsibihty and pride in the prospect of making 
good. 



Forms of Expression: Personal Behavior 187 

(3) He should conspire with the play director to 
give the child a chance to test himself out under 
favorable conditions. If there is no director, the 
group of children may pledge one another. 

(4) Children should report results in private to 
teacher and parents. 

(5) They should have, in addition to their own per- 
sonal satisfaction, the knowledge of real appreciation 
from teacher and parents. 

2. Is it best to introduce new organizations into 
the Sunday school for expression and social service, 
or should we use the class as the unit group? Your 
reasons for your view. 

References 

Athearn: The Church School (various chapters). The 

Pilgrim Press, Boston. $1.00 
Beard: Graded Missionary Education in the Church 

School. .75 American Baptist Pubhcation 

Society. 
Cabot: Every-day Ethics. Henry Holt & Co., N. Y. 

$1.25 
Diffendorfer: Missionary Education in Home and 

School. $1.50 
Hutchins: Graded Social Service for the Sunday 

School. University of Chicago Press. .75 
Kerr: Care and Training of Children. Funk and 

Wagnalls Co., N. Y. .25 



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